CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION
A. Background
Language is a means of communication. By using language people can
express their feelings, thoughts, and minds. People use language to communicate
with other in fulfilling their daily needs. In fact, language has played important role in
human life. As stated by Ramelan (1992: 10) language is an arbitrary system of
speech sound which is used in interpersonal communication by as aggregation of
human being and which is rather exhaustively catalogs things, processes and events
in human environment. Because of this, people use language functions as a means
of international communication among the nations all over the world.
It is important for us to learn language especially English since it is an
international language which is used as a means of communication among nation in
the world either in spoken or written interaction. In addition, the use of English is very
important as a means of communication so that the interest in learning English grow
very rapidly.
Ramelan (1992: 2) said that English is the first foreign language to be taught
in Indonesia. It is taught from elementary school up to university. As the first foreign
language, English is considered difficult to learn by indonesian students because
learning English is something new for them. It is different from learning their native
language. They have been surrounded by their mother tongue and spoken in their
native language since their childhood. In teaching and learning process students
must demonstrate proficient skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing.
One of the important aspects in learning a foreign language is listening.
Listening plays an important role in the language learning. It is a demanding process,
not only because of the complexity of the process itself but also due to factors that
characterize the listener, the speaker, the content of the message and any visual
support that accompanies the message. It gives the learner information from which
to build the knowledge necessary for using the language. Listening provides the
necessary input for learners to acquire the language needed for practicing a
language.
1

Listening is the language modality that is used most frequently. One of the
techniques for improving listening comprehension that is recommended in many
books about teaching EFL in general and teaching listening comprehension in
particular is dictation with a variety of alternative techniques such as partial dictation
(Celce-Murcia, 1995; Gilbert, 1996; Ur, 1991). In this study, partial dictation was used
only as a teaching technique for improving the listening comprehension ability of
intermediate EFL learners.
However, the above ideal condition is too far the reality. There is an extreme
gap between what the institution expects and the real condition. One of the
weaknesses which the students have in learning English based on the researchers
observation is listening competence. Most of them get difficulties in identifying main
idea, predicting and guessing words. The condition is influenced by many factors.
One of them is students did not have the courage to explain or to ask their difficulties
to the lecturer.
Some English lecturers at the college where the researcher carries out a
research still used the teacher-cent method and traditional method in teaching
listening. Some of them just focused on listening conversation and monologue after
that they ask to the students to choose the best option based on the context.
Besides that, they asked the students to find the meaning of difficult words in the
functional texts.
In fact, listening is the most frequently used language skill in everyday life.
Listening is a highly integrative skill. It is assuming greater importance in foreign
language classroom. Unlike other language skills such as reading and writing, which
can be observed directly, listening is an abstract, intricate process of hearing,
identifying, understanding and interpreting spoken language (Lewis, 2007). Many
students have significant problems with listening. The speed of utterances, the
reduced forms of natural English, the use of intonation for meaning, and unfamiliar
accents, all take their tools and it is essential to give learners at all levels plenty of
practice. Therefore the choice of appropriate method is a great significance in
developing listening skills and improving students overall language learning.
Brown (2001) states that listening is an important skill in language learning
and it cannot be underestimated especially in academic context. The labeling of

listening, along reading as receptive skill, is often known by people as a passive

process (Nunan, 2003; Brown, 2001; McErlain, 1999; Brown, 2004; 2 Saville-Troike,
2006). As a matter of fact, listening is an active process because it requires a person
to receive and understand information or input (Nunan, 2003).
B. Problem Statement
The research is formulated to reach the expected result to help students
listening ability.
1. What is Listening according to expert and explain some of them?
2. Explain the Princple of teaching Listening skill as an English Language?
3. What are the characteristic of Listening Process?
4. Mention type of Listening Skill?
5. How To teach Listening?

CHAPTER II
REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURES
1. Listening
This section contains the definitions of listening, learning to listen, types of
listening, listening problems, types of classroom listening performance, and
assessment of listening.
a.

Definition of Listening
Myers and Myers (1999: 143) state that listening is not only hearing, but also
including the added dimensions of understanding, paying attention, analyzing, and
evaluating the spoken messages, and possibly acting on the basis of what has been
heard. Similarly, Floyd as quoted by Myers defines listening as receiver orientation to
the communication process, since communication involves both of source and a
receiver. Rost (1994: 2) states that listening is a process triggered by our attention.
In psychological terms, attention is an excitation of nerve pathways, the brain, to
organize incoming stimuli in an efficient way. Farlex (2007: 2) defines that listening is
the act of hearing attentively.
The other definition of listening from Underwood (1997: 1) state that listening
is the activity of paying attention to and trying to get meaning from something we
hear. She explains that to listen successfully to spoken language, a listener needs to
be able to work out what speakers mean when they use particular words in particular
ways on particular occasions, and not simply to understand the words themselves.
To understand the message from spoken language, it is not enough to just
understand the words themselves; instead the incoming sound needs to be
processed involving any available cues like background noises, the speakers, the
setting, etc. to construct meaning.
There are many different types of listening which can be classified according
to number variables, including purpose for listening, the role of listener, and types of
text being listened to. These variables are mixed in many different configurations,
each which will require a particular strategy on the part of the listener. To be
4

successful in listening to foreign language, listeners are required to apply such

strategy that best fit to comprehend message.
2. Learning to Listen
Listening comprehension also has an important role in determining the
learners success in learning language, especially in communication. We cannot
communicate with others if we do not understand what the speaker intends. That is
why there is a lot of misunderstanding between the listener and the speaker. Why
misunderstanding always occurs in communication, what the speaker said and
intended, is determined by the listeners ability in answering the speakers question.
Learning to listen in our first language is by no means easy. It requires
considerable cognitive development and constant attention to social and linguistic
input over of period of several grades. However, learning to listen in a second
language seems to be even more difficult. While it may not require more time to
develop, second language listening is confounded by a number of difficulties.
In responding to the students difficulties in learning to listen, first the teacher
has to identify and to classify the difficulties that are faced by the students. Second,
he selects and designs appropriate materials in solving the students difficulties, in
order to make the students more effective listeners. Considering the difficulties or the
problems which are faced by the students, it will be better if the teacher understands
how the process of listening comprehension is achieved by them.
According to Hellene and Brown, students learn to listen or read through two
processes, they are bottom-up and top-down processing (1994: xii):
a. Bottom-up processing
Bottom-up processing is trying to make sense of what we hear by focusing on
different parts; the vocabulary, the grammar, sounds, etc, however, it is difficult to get
overall parts. And when you try to understand what the speaker say by only looking
at the grammar or vocabulary that you do not understand since you are learning a
new language or foreign language then you cannot focus on what you are listening
to.

b. Top-down processing
Top-down processing starts with background of knowledge called schema.
Schema is classified into two. First, content schema that is general knowledge based
on life experience and previous learning. Second, textual schema that is the
knowledge of language and content used in the particular situation: the language you
need at the office is different than what you need when socializing with friends.
Furthermore Brown (1997: 11) states that the active listener will use
all relevant background knowledge of the physical context of the utterance (the
immediate surroundings, the place, the time of day, etc), knowledge of the speaker
(gender, age, known opinions), knowledge of the topic (and what the speaker is likely
to know about it, or feel about it), and so on.
In short, in the top-down processing, students do not need to pay much
attention to the language used. As in some situations, the topic or the speaker is so
familiar that they can take for granted a great deal of what is said. It allows anchoring
their comprehension on what they think is relevant knowledge of the topic, the
speaker, and so on.
3. Types of Listening Activities

An essential listener is exposing the listeners to variety of listening activities.

According to Hellenes and Brown (1994: xii) there are three types of listening
activities, namely:
a. Listening skill for understanding the general meaning.
It is listening skill for understanding the general meaning. The listener is
usually quick to understand the idea of the text. He/she can imagine for catch the
general meaning of something he/ she hears.
b. Listening for the specific information/ listening for detail
It involves understanding the task and focusing to catch certain information.
c. Listening between the lines/ understanding inferences
Understanding inferences is the most difficult skill in the listening activities. It
is not just imagining meanings. It is thinking about meaning that is given, even

though the specific words are not the stirty. Here, in this listening activity, the hearer
must be able to draw the inference of the story.
4.

Listening Problems
The first step the learning problems that student in constructing a successful
listening is to identify the learning problems that students are experiencing as a
result of listening to related issues. Ur (1996: 111-112) identifies the learners
problems and the solution as follows:
a. Trouble with the sounds
Most students rely mostly on context for comprehension; they are often
themselves unaware sound perception.
b. Have understand very word
Some students feel worried and stressed when they miss some words of the
text. Here, the teacher needs to give the students practice in selective ignoring of
heard information/something they do naturally in their mother tongue. The teacher
should explain this point to the students, and set them occasional tasks that ask
them to scan a relatively long task for one two limited items of information.
c. Cannot understand fast, naturally native speaker
The students can only understand if the teacher talks slowly and clearly. They
cannot understand fast, natural native-sounding speech. To overcome this problem,
the teacher has to expose the students to as much spontaneous-informal talk as
possible, so they can understand the native speech. The teacher can also provide
them with the sorts of discourse at the right level for them.
d. Need to hear thing. More than once
In order to understand, students need more than once to hear the text. In this
problem, the teacher can try to use texts that include redundant passage and within
which the essential information is presented more than once and not too intensively
and give the students the opportunity to request clarification are repetition during the
listening.
e. Find it difficult to keep up
The students feel overloaded with incoming information. The solution is not
(so much) to slow down the discourse but rather to encourage them to relax, stop
7

trying to understand everything, learn to pick out what is essential and allow them to
ignore the rest.
f. Get tired
Sometimes, students feel tired and bored to listen, if the discourse is too long.
They also feel more difficult to concentrate: The solution of this problem is similar
with the third problem.
Similar to Ur (1996: 113), Rost (1994: 119) has identified the listeners problems
as follows: acuity of hearing, discrimination and auditory perception, attention and
concentration, comprehension including four aspects, namely: factual or literal
comprehension, interpretation, critical listening, and evolution listening.
a. Acuity of hearing
Some pupils have physical problems which prevent them from participating full or
owing to environmental problem (such as noise), are not hearing what is said.
b. Discrimination and auditory perception
Some pupils have problem with auditory memory (recalling what they have just
heard) and sequential memory (recalling in correct sequence of words or utterance
they have just heard.
c. Attention and concentration
Many pupils have difficulties following instructions owing to apparent in attention
and concentration. Such pupils may not be adapting well to the numerous distraction
in a typical classroom.
d. Comprehension
Numerous

pupils

have

difficulties

with

different

aspects

of

listening

comprehension. Some have trouble with factual or literal comprehension (identifying

what was said or what facts were stated); others have trouble with interpretation
(such as categorizing new information or seeing cause-effect relationship between
facts); other have trouble with critical listening (applying what they have heard and
problem-solving). Still others have problems with evolutional listening (appreciating
or commenting critically on what they have heard.

5. Difficulties in Listening

According to many experts (Dunkel, 1991; Richards, 1983; and Ur, 1984),
there are eight factors making listening difficult as follows :
a. Clustering, in written language we are conditioned to attend the sentence as the

basic unit of organization. In spoken language, due to the memory limitations and
our predisposition for chunking or clustering, we break down speech into smaller
group of world.
b. Redundancy, spoken language unlike written language, has a good deal of

redundancy. The next time we are in conversation, notice the rephrasing, repetitions,
elaborations, and little insertion of I mean and You know, here and there. Such
redundancy helps the hearer to process meaning by offering more time and extra
information.
c. Reduced form, while spoken language does indeed contain a good deal of

redundancy, it also has many reduced forms. The reduction can be phonological,
morphological, syntactic, and pragmatic. These reductions pose significant difficulties
especially to classroom learners.
d. Performance variables, in spoken language, except for plan discourse,

hesitations, false starts, pauses, and correction are common. Learners have to train
themselves to listen for meaning in the midst of all these distracting performance
variables.
e. Colloquial language, learners who have been exposed to standard written English

and/or textbook language sometimes find it surprising and difficult to deal with
colloquial language. Idioms, slang, reduced forms, shared cultural knowledge, are all
manifested at some point of conversation.
f. Rate of delivery, virtually every language learner initially thinks that native speaker

speak too fast. Actually as Richard (1983) points out, the number of length pauses
used by a speaker is more crucial to comprehension than sheer speed.
g. Stress, rhythm, and intonation, the prosodic features of the English language are

very important for comprehension. As a stressed time language, English speech can
9

be a terror for some learners as mouthfuls of syllables come spilling out between
stress points.
h. Interaction, unless a language learners objectives is exclusively to master some

specialized skill like monitoring radio broadcast or attending lectures, interaction will
play a large role in listening comprehension.
6. Types of Classroom Performance
With literally hundreds of possible techniques available for teaching listening skill,
it will be helpful to think in terms of several kinds of listening performance. (Rost
1994:119). The types of listening performance are as the following:
a. Reactive
This kind of listening performance requires little meaningful processing, it
nevertheless may be a legitimate, even though a minor, aspect of an interactive
communicative classroom. The role of the listeners is merely as a tape recorder
because the listener is not generating meaning.
b. Intensive
The purpose of the technique is to focus on components (phonemes, words,
intonation, discourse etc) of discourse. It may be considered to be intensive, as
opposed to extensive, in their requirement that students single out certain elements
of spoken language.
c. Responsive
A significant proportion of classroom listening activity consists of short
stretches of teacher language designed to elicit immediate response. The students
task in such listening is to process the teacher talk immediately.
Rost (1991: 3) listen the necessary component skills in the listening as: (a)
discriminating between sounds; (b) recognizing words; (c) identifying grammatical
grouping of words; (d) identifying pragmatic units-expression and set of utterances
which function as a whole units to create meaning; (e) connecting linguistic cues
(gesture and relevant objects in the situation) in order to construct meaning; (f) using
background knowledge (what we has already know about the content and the form)
and context (what we has already been said) to predict and then to confirm meaning;
(g) recalling important words and ideas.
10

To be successful in listening, listeners involve an integration of these

component skills. That means listening is not the individual skills themselves instead
it is a coordination of the component skills. A persons listening ability is the
integration of the perception skills, analyzing skills, and synthesis skills.
In listening comprehension, use effective listening skills can help students
capitalize on the language input they are receiving. Axbey (1989: 4) states that
successful listening in the classroom depends partly on good preparation. The
context of what he or she is going to listen should be introduced to the students such
as who is speaking, where, when, and to what purpose. This information enables
them make predictions of the content and language, for example, before and during
listening.
To think that listening task, there are some aspect such as discriminating
(spelling sound discrimination), identifying main idea, and listening for detailed
information which are used by the researcher to conduct teaching listening and used
in testing the students listening ability. The task for the researcher in designing
listening test is determining the active or passive listening. Specifically, students
need to know the listening competence they most frequently encounter in their
academic studies in order to successfully complete their assignment. In order to
rarely know how to listen well, students must:
a. Discriminating
Some pupils have problem with auditory memory (recalling what they have
just heard) and sequential memory (recalling in correct sequence of words or
utterance they have just heard.
b. Recognizing Words
In order to recognize word, we have to perform three stimulitaneous
processes: find the most probable candidate word among several possibilities,
estimate the best meaning of the word in the context, and find the refence for the
speakers words.
c. Responding

11

A significant proportion of classroom listening activity consists of short text of

teacher language designed to elicit immediate responses. The students tasks in
such listening to process the teacher talk immediately.
d. Comprehending
Some have trouble with factual or literal comprehension (identifying what was
said or what facts were stated); others have trouble with interpretation (such as
categorizing new information or seeing cause-effect relationship between facts);
others have trouble with critical listening (applying what they have heard and
problem solving). They are some ways in which the students comprehend, they are:
1. Understanding for the specific information
It involves understanding the task and focusing to catch certain information.
2. Understanding for the inferential information
Understanding inferences is the most difficult skill in the listening activities. It
is not just imagining meanings. It is thinking about meaning that is given, even
though the specific words are not the stirty. Here, in this listening activity, the
hearer must be able to draw the inference of the story.
3. Understanding for the main idea
It is listening skill for understanding the general meanings. The listener is
usually quick to understand the idea of the text. He/she can imagine to catch
the general meaning of something he/she hear.
From the explanation above, it can be concluded that listening is an activity of
paying attention to what has been heard in order to understand the message.
Listeners take in the sounds uttered by a speaker and use them to construct an
interpretation of what they think the speaker intends to convey. Listening skills
consist of the aspect of discriminating sounds, identifying main idea, and listening for
detailed information.
7. Definition of Teaching Listening Comprehension

Comprehension is often considered to be the first-order goal of listening, the

highest priority of the listener and sometimes the sole purpose of listening. Although
the term listening comprehension is widely used to refer to all aspects of listening,
the term comprehension will be discussed more specific here.
12

According to Rost (2002: 59) comprehension is the process of relating

language to concepts in ones memory and to reference in the real world.
Comprehension is the sense of understanding what the language used refers to in
ones experiences or in the outside world. Complete comprehension then refers to
the listener having clear concepts in memory for every referent used by the speaker.
The process of comprehending occurs in an ongoing cycle as the listener is
attending to speech. A concrete starting point of discussing how comprehension
takes places is the notion of given and new information. The term new refers to
the status that the information is undefined by the listener. Given refers to the
status that the information is already known by the listeners. Most fundamental
aspect of comprehension is the integration of the information conveyed by the text
with information and concepts already known by the listeners. In teaching listening
there are main stages that we should construct. It is the same as we teach listening
comprehension. They are:
a. Pre-listening
Pre-listening is the warming up activity before the students have the real
listening tasks. Pre-listening is how we can help learners achieve the balance
between the top-down and bottom-up processing. In many warm-up activities,
learners do task to activate their schemata. When learners use both top-down and
bottom-up processing, this is called interactive processing. Pre-listening activity is
almost the same as brainstorming in reading or writing.
In real life it is unusual for people to listen to something without having some
idea of what they are going to hear. Rees in his article at teachingenglish.org.uk
explain that pre-listening task aim to deal with (1) Setting the context i.e. giving an
idea about who is speaking, where and why. (2) Activating current knowledge i.e.
asking questions related to the context. (3) Acquiring knowledge i.e. providing
knowledge input to the students. (4) Activating vocabulary or language i.e. providing
vocabulary that they may find in the context. (5) Checking or understanding the
listening tasks i.e. give students plenty of time to understand the main listening
comprehension.
b. Listening tasks
13

There are three types of listening activities for beginners level. They are
listening for specific information, listening and inferences.
c. Post-listening
The range of post listening activities is at least as wide as listening tasks
themselves. At times, post listening maybe as simple as checking the answers to
comprehension questions, either by the teacher telling the learners what the correct
answers are, by eliciting answers from the students themselves, or by having
students compare their answers in pairs or small groups (Helgesen and Brown,
2007: 17).
8. Principles for Developing Listening Ability
To develop listening ability, learners need a great deal exposure to spoken
language and sample practice in various listening situations. However, in addition to
exposure and practice, it is of vital importance for the listeners to become engage in
the process of listening and develop desire to understand. Different type of listener
will have different approach to their development of listening ability.
a. Listening ability develop through face to face interaction
Face to face interaction provides stimulation for development of listening for
meaning. Learners have the chance for new language input and the chance to check
their own listening ability by interacting in English.
b. Listening develop through focusing on meaning and trying to learn new and
important content in the target language.
Learners can activate both their linguistic and non-linguistic abilities to
understand by focusing on meaning and real reasons for listening.
c. Listening ability develops through work on comprehension activities.
By focusing on specific goals for listening, learners can evaluate their efforts
and abilities. By having well-defined comprehension activities, learners have
opportunities for assessment of what they achieved and for revision.
d. Listening develops through attention to accuracy and an analysis of form.
Learners can make steady progress by learning to perceive sounds and
words accurately as they work on meaning-oriented activities and they gain

14

confidence in listening for meaning by learning to hear sounds and words more
accurately.
9. Kinds of Listening Text

There are two kinds of listening texts; they are monologue text and dialogue
text. In monologue the listener is not required to respond the massage. It is also
called an informational listening. This is where information is communicated to the
listeners. Monologue can be planned, or unplanned. Monologues are the example of
one way communication. There are some other kinds of one way communication,
they are Radio and television programs, public address announcements (airports,
train/bus stations, stores) and Speeches and lectures
Dialogue requires listeners to respond to what is being communicated. The
goal of dialogue is to develop interaction between people. In dialogues, there are
interpersonal and transactional dialogues. The listener communicates something
back to the speaker. For example, greeting between friends, a meeting business
discussion and giving or receiving instructions at work.
According to Brown (1996: 234) the importance of listening in language
learning can hardly be overestimated. Through perception, we internalize linguistic
information without which we could not produce language. In classroom, students
always do more listening than speaking. Listening competence is universally larger
than speaking competence. Listening comprehension does not always draw the
attention of educators that it now has. Perhaps human beings have a natural
tendency to look at speaking as the major index of language proficiency.
10. Dictation Related Auditory Tasks
a. Kind of Dictation Tasks
This part focuses attention on a family of auditory testing procedures. The
best researched of them is a variety of dictation which we will refer to as standard
dictation. This variety and others related to it are described in some detail below, but
is should be noted early that the few testing techniques which are discussed in this
and in following parts are scarcely indicative of the range of possible pragmatic
testing procedure. More particularly, the few auditory tasks described in this part are
far from a complete accounting of possible tests. In fact, no complete listing can ever
15

be obtained because their number is unbounded in principle. The techniques

discussed are intended merely to introduce some of the possibilities that are known
to work well. It is not to set the limits of the range of pragmatic auditory tasks that are
possible.
Johansson (1973) suggests two methods for selecting materials, on way is to
tape a portion of natural discourse- a lecture, a radio program, a conversation, or
some other verbal exchange. Another is to concoct a text or script to be tape
recorded as if it were one of the foregoing, or merely to tape record a script, say, a
paragraph of prose. In the first case it is necessary to transform the auditory version
into a written form, that is, write the script. In the second, one starts with the script
and then makes a recording of it.
f. The Advantages and Disadvantages of Dictation
1. The Advantages of Dictation
Contrary to essay writing which can be judged as too open ended, a dictation
is right or wrong, therefore it is an easy exercise for new instructors and it can give
students a chance to know where they stand compared to the rest of the class.
Among the list of 21 advantages offered by Ruth Montalvan:
(1) Develops short term memory.
(2) It can be an excellent review exercise.
(3) It is challenging.
(4) Involves the whole class, no matter how large it is.
(5) Corrections can be done by the students.
(6) Can be prepared for any level.
(7) Dictation can help develop all four language skills in an integrative way.
(8) Provides feedback for students as well as teachers.
(9) Research has shown that learning to write down what you hear can encourage
the development of literacy.
It is important that the candidates should be assessed in situations as close
as possible to those in which they will be required to use the language. For dictation,
this involves them listening to dictated material which incorporates oral messages
typical of those they might encounter in the target situation.

16

a. Given our concern with reliability as well as validity, it is perhaps advisable to

improve the overall reliability of a listening battery by including a format which has a
proven track record in this respect. A dictation can provide this reliability through the
large number of items that can be generated as well as being valid for specific
situation where dictation might feature as a target group activity.
b. There is a lot of evidence which shows dictation correlating highly with a great
variety of other tests, particularly with other integrative tests such as cloze and it is
often employed as a useful measure of general proficiency. There is some evidence
that the use of a semantic scoring scheme (see weir, 1983a) as against an exact
word system serve to enhance the correlations with other construct valid test of
listening.
c. Criticisms of dictation in the past stemmed from a viewpoint heavily influenced by
structural linguistics that favoured testing the more discrete elements of language
skills and wished to avoid the possibility of muddied measurement. Heaton (1975)
commented as a testing device it measures too many different language features to
be effective in providing a means of assessing any one particular skill. The
proponents of dictation, however, consider its very integrative nature to be
advantage since it reflects more faithfully how people process language in real life
contexts.
d. The new interest in dictation reflected the paradigm shift in testing values and
objectives referred to above. Whereas in 1967 Vallette had observed that foreign
language specialists were not in agreement on the effectiveness of dictation as an
examination for more advanced students, significantly ten years later she was able
to state that dictation was a precise measure of overall proficiency and an excellent
method of grouping incoming students according to ability levels..
f. Oller (1979) claimed that a dynamic process of analysis by synthesis was involved.
Dictation draws on learners ability to use all systems of the language in conjunction
with knowledge of the world, context, etc., to predict what will be said (synthesis of
message) and after the message has been uttered to scrutinise this via the short
term memory in order to see if it fits with what had been predicted (analysis).
2) The Disadvantages of Dictation
Traditional dictation is not a great oral comprehension exercise since it has
little to do with authentic communication. Dictations are in fact written passages that
17

are read out loud so they do not help students to understand the difference between
the oral and the written language. Furthermore they are read at a slower pace than
people speak normally and are therefore of little value to help students understand
the language spoken by natives.
1. Memorizing, the short term memory can be overwhelmed if they is too much that
the student does not understand.
2. Writing respecting the relation between sounds and letters is next to impossible if
the student did not understand and guessing does not always work. There is a great
deal of emphasis put on spelling mistakes in a dictation yet there is very little work
done to help the students to perceive the basic sound-spelling correspondences
revealed by their dictation errors.
3. Syllabic but depends on a rhythmic group and which has no break between
syllables.
Besides the disadvantages above there are other disadvantages as follows:
(1) Alderson (1978a) concludes that the evidence concerning dictation is
inconclusive and that it is useful only as part of battery of listening tests rather than a
single solution. He points out (1978a, p. 365) that:
The reason it correlates more with some sub-tests than with others does not
appear to be date to the claimed fact that it is an integrative test, but because it is
essentially a test of low level linguistic skills. Hence the dictation correlates best with
those cloze tests, texts and scoring methods which themselves best allow the
measurement of these skills.
(2) Dictation will be trivial unless the short term memory of the students is challenge
and the length of the utterances dictated will depend on the listeners ability up to the
limit that native speaker counterparts could handle.
(3) Marking may well be problematic if one wishes to take into account seriousness
of error or if one wishes to adopt a more communicatively oriented marking scheme
where a mark is given if the candidate has understood the substance of the message
and redundant features are ignored.

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(4) If the dictation is not recorded on tape, the test will be less reliable, as there will
be differences in, for example, the speed of delivery of the text to different
audiences.
(5) The exercise can be unrealistic if the texts used have been previously created to
be read rather than heard.

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CHAPTER III
CONCLUSION
1. Listening is the activity of paying attention to and trying to get meaning from
something we hear. She explains that to listen successfully to spoken
language, a listener needs to be able to work out what speakers mean when
they use particular words in particular ways on particular occasions, and not
simply to understand the words themselves. To understand the message from
spoken language, it is not enough to just understand the words themselves;
instead the incoming sound needs to be processed involving any available
cues like background noises, the speakers, the setting, etc. to construct
meaning.

2. The types of listening performance :

a. Reactive
b. Intensive
c. Responsive

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Celce-Murcia M. 1995. Discourse analysis and the teaching of listening. In G. Cook
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McErlain, Tricia. (1999). The Nature of Listening: The need for listening in English for
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http://WhydictationsMeritsandvariationsofdictationsinEnglishlanguageteachingMyEng
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http://DictationIsitreallyeffectiveforlanguageteaching.htm
http://TheEffectOfPartialDictationEnglishLanguageEssay.htm

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