Jumat, 07 Januari 2011 Listening Skill in Language Learning Diposting oleh an.pane di 18.42

taken from google images

Looking at my experience in school observation, I saw how listening and speaking skill are important. It was clear when I had to interview some students and asked them some questions about their product. In this article, I want to focus on listening skill. However, listening is often followed by speaking. It is supported by Krashen’s (1982) ideas about comprehensible input, where a language learner gets the input from others (by listening) then produce what he/she learn from others (by speaking). That is why listening became a foundation for speaking.

Nunan (1989) says that listening has two views which exist in language pedagogy; they are bottom up view and top-down view. Bottom-up view assumes that listening is a process of decoding the sounds, from the smallest meaningful units (phonemes) to complete texts. Let’s take a look one example:

Goal: find the stressed syllables

Example: Listen to words of two or three syllables. Mark them for the word stress and predict the pronunciation of the unstressed syllable.

On the other hand, top-down emphasizes on how listeners actively construct the original meaning of the speaker. Here, the listeners use prior knowledge of the context to make them understand about what they hear, for example:

Goal: Listen to identify the topic

Example: Listen to a radio commercial. On the answer sheet, choose among four types of product and identify the picture that goes with it.

It is very important to combine those two views and use them in Indonesian schools. However, in my opinion, Bottom-up view is rarely used in Indonesian schools while the top-down is more often. Considering it as the basic view, I think it should be used in all levels even started from the beginner level.  It is important for our speaking skill too. In fact, when I was in school, I never studied materials which used Bottom-up view, such as learning about minimal pairs. It was easier for me to find the exercise using top-down view.  I think it is because many people or teachers see bottom-up view as a simple view which can be ‘ignored’ in language learning process. I do not agree with this assumption because those two views are related and should be combined together.

What do you think about these two views? :)