Listening as a language skill

In every field of study, skill is the prominent goal that needs to reach for. It is the capital for student to increase their quality as an educated people. In addition everybody will value someone knowledge by looking at how many skill they master. According to Jack C Richard skill is an acquired ability to perform an activity well, usually one that is made up of a number of coordinated processes and actions.[1]

 It same like a language, there are 4 major skills in language study, they are; listening, speaking, reading, and writing. These are the skills that most of people always value in a language proficiency test. In other ways Jack Richard classified these skills into two types; oral skill (listening and speaking), reading, and writing skill. Some methods focus primarily on oral skills and say that reading and writing skills are secondary and derive from transfer of oral skills.[2]

Base on this reason we can say that listening is more important than others so that teacher and student need to concern a lot in it. Because there is no many student can overcome their problem in listening quickly. They must patient to undergo the exhausted period in which they should listen to speaker even sometime it makes them dizzy.

As a language skill, listening has some component skill that determines the successful listening. This component should integrated in listening activity. Here are these components:[3]

a.       Discriminating between sounds

b.      Recognizing words

c.       Identifying grammatical groupings of words

d.      Identifying “pragmatic units”- expressions and sets of utterances which function as whole units to create meaning.

e.       Connecting linguistic cues to paralinguistic cues (intonation and stress) and to non-linguistic cues (gestures and relevant objects in the situation) in order to construct meaning.

f.        Using background knowledge and context to predict and confirm meaning.

g.       Recalling important words and ideas

By looking at the explanation above we can conclude that every skill have some aspects that determine the success of their study. Eventually many student especially ESL/EFL, they have problem in listening comprehension. And because of this reason many method and approach have much concern on this skill.  

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[1] Ibid p. 489

[2] Jack C Richard and Theodore S Rogers, Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching (Reino Unido: Cambridge University Press, 1987)  p. 20

[3] Paraskevi Andreopoulou, “Focus on Listening: Why Do Beginner Find Listening Is Difficult?” (Language Skill Assignment, Cambridge Delta Course,2009 ) p. 3

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