It has been estimated that adults spend almost half their communication time listening, and students may receive much information through listening to instructors and to one another. Often, however,
language learners do not recognize the level of effort that goes into developing listening ability.
Far from passively receiving and recording aural input, listeners actively involve themselves in the interpretation of what they hear, bringing their own background knowledge and linguistic knowledge to bear on the information contained in the aural text. Not all listening is the same; casual greetings, for example, require a different sort of listening capability than do academic lectures. Language learning requires intentional listening that employs strategies for identifying sounds and making meaning from them.
Listening involves a sender (a person, radio, television), a message, and a receiver (the listener). Listeners often must process messages as they come, even if they are still processing what they have just heard, without backtracking or looking ahead. In addition, listeners must cope with the sender's choice of vocabulary, structure, and rate of delivery. The complexity of the listening process is magnified in second language contexts, where the receiver also has incomplete control of the language.
(NCLRC-http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/listening/liindex.htm).
Given the importance of listening in language learning and teaching, it is essential for language teachers to help their students become effective listeners. In the communicative approach to language teaching, this means modeling listening strategies and providing listening practice in authentic situations: those that learners are likely to encounter when they use the language outside the classroom.
There are so many way to teach listening, but for the students always said that listening subject is the difficult study, then how the teacher make the classroom to be enjoy and the students feel relax? Can be through listen to the song, pictures, watching English movie or sound from the reading or recorder. Then is it enough? The answer is not! Students still feel bore. Then how? The teacher must mix the learning with some new like discussion, debate, conversation, role play, games and etc. this classroom types called by Interactive classroom technique.
This article also give the solution, How the interactive class will control and make the class be fun and students will understand well what they hear, also how the listening classroom process using interactive classroom techniques. In the other hand, sometimes not all the school has facilitation like electric or electronic media for listening process so the teacher must be can to more active to teach listening, how to make the class be active and run well and also still fun so the students can enjoy it.
This article will be a beneficial contribution to the field of teaching process particularly in listening, like: to apply performance classes to the teacher in teaching listening class.
DISCUSSION
Listening is an invisible mental process, making it difficult to describe. Listeners must discriminate between sounds, understand vocabulary and grammatical structures, interpret stress and intention, retain and interpret this within the immediate as well as the larger socio-cultural context of the utterance defines listening, in its broadest sense, as a process of receiving what the speaker actually says (receptive orientation); constructing and representing meaning (constructive orientation); negotiating meaning with the speaker and responding (collaborative orientation); and, creating meaning through involvement, imagination and empathy (transformative orientation). Listening is a complex, active process of interpretation in which listeners match what they hear with what they already know (http://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/67).
With literally hundreds of possible techniques available for teaching listening skills, it will be helpful for you to think in terms of several kinds of listening performance that is, what your student do in a listening technique. Sometimes these types of performance are embedded in a broader techniques or task and sometimes they are themselves the sum total of the activity of a technique. Now we will discuss about one of the type it is Interactive.
- A. Definition Of Teaching
- Teach
- The act or business of instructing; also, that which is taught; instruction.
- the activities of educating or instructing or teaching; activities that impart knowledge or skill
- the profession of a teacher; "he prepared for teaching while still in college"; "pedagogy is recognized as an important profession"
- "teaching is the process of carrying out those activities that experience has shown to be effective in getting students to learn"
- B. Definition Of Listening
Listening comprehension is a complex process, crucial in the development of second language competence. Listeners use both bottom-up processers (linguistic knowledge) and top-down processes (prior knowledge) to comprehend. Knowing the context of a listening text and the purpose for listening greatly reduces the burden of comprehension (Larry Vandergrift-http://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/67).
Listening is a complex, active process of interpretation in which listeners match what they hear with what they already know.
LISTENING PROCESS
There are two distinct processes involved in listening comprehension. Listeners use 'top-down' processes when they use prior knowledge to understand the meaning of a message. Prior knowledge can be knowledge of the topic, the listening context, the text-type, the culture or other information stored in long-term memory as schemata (typical sequences or common situations around which world knowledge is organized). Listeners use content words and contextual clues to form hypotheses in an exploratory fashion.
(Larry Vandergrift-http://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/67)
On the other hand, listeners also use 'bottom-up' processes when they use linguistic knowledge to understand the meaning of a message. They build meaning from lower level sounds to words to grammatical relationships to lexical meanings in order to arrive at the final message. Listening comprehension is not either top-down or bottom-up processing, but an interactive, interpretive process where listeners use both prior knowledge and linguistic knowledge in understanding messages. The degree to which listeners use the one process or the other will depend on their knowledge of the language, familiarity with the topic or the purpose for listening.
A. Listening In Language Learning And Teaching Listeners use metacognitive, cognitive and socio-affective strategies to facilitate comprehension and to make their learning more effective. Metacognitive strategies are important because they oversee, regulate or direct the language learning process. Cognitive strategies manipulate the material to be learned or apply a specific technique to a listening task. Socio-affective strategies describe the techniques listeners use to collaborate with others, to verify understanding or to lower anxiety. Research shows that skilled listeners use more metacognitive strategies than their less-skilled counterparts (O'Malley & Chamot, 1990, Vandergrift, 1997a).When listeners know how to
- analyse the requirements of a listening task;
- activate the appropriate listening processes required;
- make appropriate predictions;
- monitor their comprehension; and
- evaluate the success of their approach,
- B. Interactive Classroom
An interactive classroom is one in which learners participate as equal partners in the learning process. The teacher acts as a facilitator and guide, but the learners are enthusiastically playing their part in learning. Apart from the fact that learner participation makes the teaching task more interesting for the teacher, research has shown that much more learning takes place in an interactive classroom than in a passive one (http://www.e4africa.co.za/?p=4147).
TEACHING LISTENING COMPREHENSION USING INTERACTIVE LISTENING CLASSROOM PERFORMANCE
What are the features of an interactive classroom? It definitely is not a place where a teacher lectures and the children passively listen. Learners do writing exercises, take part in class discussions and actively participate in solving problems. An interactive classroom also requires that learners engage in higher-order thinking tasks, which include analysis of information, evaluation of the facts and a process of synthesis to build new knowledge.
Many teachers have acquired the skills to transform a dull classroom into an interactive one. Different techniques exist to do this and where teachers apply these techniques the attitudes and achievements of learners are affected positively.
The key to a successful interactive classroom is in the hands of the teacher – it is not dependent on any fancy tools or equipment. However, children are fascinated by technology. They grow up in a world dominated by technology and they likely have cell phones or other mobile devices in their pockets. The wise teacher makes use of technology to enhance the learning experience of their learners. In this way technology enables an interactive classroom (http://www.e4africa.co.za/?p=4147).
Teaching listening using an interactive classroom performance is one of the technique that can include all five of the types of learners actively participate in discussion, debates, conversations, role plays and other pair and group work (Brown, Douglas, H.-2001).
First, in the warming up we as the teacher an optional section to help focus on the topic and prepare them. Then in main activity students listen to the recording and fulfill a variety of realistic and authentic tasks. The last an opportunity to personalize the topic and develop the scope of the lesson.
A. Integrating Listening Strategies With Textbook Audio And Video In Interactive Classroom Performance: Base on Hamer, Jeremy-fourth edition, the writer have the idea that students can use this outline for both in-class and out-of-class listening/viewing activities. Model and practice the use of the outline at least once in class before you ask students to use it independently.
1. Plan for listening/viewing
- Review the vocabulary list, if you have one
- Review the worksheet, if you have one
- Review any information you have about the content of the tape/video
- (tape) Use fast forward to play segments of the tape; (video) view the video without sound
- Identify the kind of program (news, documentary, interview, drama)
- Make a list of predictions about the content
- Decide how to divide the tape/video into sections for intensive listening/viewing
- Jot down key words you understand
- Answer the worksheet questions pertaining to the section
- If you don't have a worksheet, write a short summary of the section
- Ask the students to discuss their answer together or in a group (they will have conversation, debates, discussion, or teacher can make the rules as the role play)
- Does it fit with the predictions you made?
- Does your summary for each section make sense in relation to the other sections?
B. Assessing Listening Proficiency
Listening has often played second fiddle to its counterpart, speaking.
We there for need to pay close attention to listening as a mode of performance for assessment in the classroom. For full comprehension, test takers may at the extensive level need to involve interactive skills (perhaps note-taking, questioning, discussion) listening as test-takers actively participate in discussions, debates, conversations, role plays, and pair and group work. Their listening performance must be intricately integrated with speaking in the authentic give and take of communication interchange (Brown, Douglas, H. (2004)).
For example, for listening practice you have students listen to a weather report. Their purpose for listening is to be able to advise a friend what to wear the next day. As a post-listening activity, you ask students to select appropriate items of clothing from a collection you have assembled, or write a note telling the friend what to wear, or provide oral advice to another student (who has not heard the weather report). To evaluate listening comprehension, you use a checklist containing specific features of the forecast, marking those that are reflected in the student's clothing recommendations.
CONCLUSSION
Based on the explanation above so can be conclude that listening is the complicated process and it is very difficult. So many of the students said that listening is very difficult, bore and quite class, so the teacher must be can make the listening to be fun and students can enjoy it.
There are some performances that we can use in teaching listening, one of it is interactive classroom performance.
Teaching listening using interactive classroom performance is fun for the students so they will not feel bore which one in interactive classroom, the students will be have conversation, discussion, debates, role play in group.
Of course in interactive classroom performance the speaking ability is very needed and function too.
In interactive classroom performance, the teacher can ask the students to listen a video or sound about several times continue, after that teacher ask them to fill the question sheet, then ask them to discuss in group or class about the questions answer.
For the assessing, the teacher can combine the assess, which one in here the students must be mastery English language well. How good the students can get the information that has been listened from the audio or video and discuss it or debates the answer if they have fill the questions sheets in conversation (can be in group).
REFERENCES
Brown, Douglas, H. (2001). Teaching by Principles an Interactive Approach to language Pedagogy (second edition). San Fransisco State University.
Brown, Douglas, H. (2004). Language Assessment Principles and Classroom Practices. San Fransisco State University.
Hamer, Jeremy. The Practice of English Language Teaching. Pearson Longman.
O'Malley, J. M. & A. U. Chamot (1990). Learning Strategies in Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wenden, A. (1998). Metacognitive Knowledge and Language Learning. Applied Linguistics
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