Nunan, as quoted by Nation & Newton (2009: 37), pointed out that listening plays an important role in second or foreign language learning. This is because the learning of language relies upon hearing. It has been noted that more than 50 percent of the time students spent listening would be dedicated to studying foreign languages. Teaching listening should however not be overlooked concerning the level of listening comprehension of the pupils, which is much smaller than all other verbal abilities they have.
a. The Definition of Listening
To do well, listening as art takes more than just having the passive incoming voice to the ear. Good listening is an active uphill warning and
active engagement mechanism (Dominic, 1958: 5). Ekrem (2016: 30) clarifies that listening is not a passive ability, but an active ability to create the sense of sound waves. Listening is a necessary subject to communicate about so learning does not take place without knowing the entry at the correct stage.
To describe what listening is, there are several meanings. First, as listeners hear speech sounds and want to get the sense of the words spoken, Ekrem (2016: 30) argued that listening is an involved and interactional process. Listening is often a mechanism of psychological acceptance, where listening is involved in generating context and responding to verbal and/or non-verbal messages (Tyagi, 2013: 1). To construct a sense from spoken input, mental processes. He also added that listening in the language is important because it provides feedback for the reaction of the learner. Without knowing feedback at the right stage, it is not possible to begin any learning. Listening is, thus, central to listening.
From the concept of listening above, listening is important for students to learn English as simple input material. It is a very complicated process dependent on linguistic code (language form) awareness and cognitive processing abilities (the skill process in the mind).
a. Aspect of Listening
Listening is little more than listening, but learning is an important ability. Kline (1996: 7) believed that an important aspect for studying and teaching to listen successfully is to understand the distinction between
hearing and listening. The distinction is that the acceptance of the sound is understood, whereas listening is an attachment by expression to the meaning. Hearing is an inactive experience, but hearing is an engaging activity. Helem Crom quoted from D. Renukadevi (2014: 60) agreed that listening is an integral aspect of communication because the generation of significant and substantive responses is important. Listening plays an important role, particularly for learning the language for communicative purposes, as it helps language students in pronunciation, word stress, vocabulary, and syntax as well as knowing only in tone and accent the past messages; and that's what we get in listening. There can be no change in schooling without adequate comprehension.
Listening requires various kinds of knowledge: linguistic and non- linguistic. Syntax, lexis, phonology, and semantic form are contained in linguistic information. In listening, students must first hear certain sounds and keep them long enough in their working memory to relate to them that the word has meaning before the students can understand the message.
b. Micro- and Macro- Skills of Listening
The micro-skills and macro-skills for traditional listening were described clearly by Ekrem Solak, cited in Brown (2006: 34). He listed the micro-skills of listening in five stages. Next, the basic sounds of English are distinguished. Secondly, the preservation of various phrases spans short-term memory. The third is to recognize English stress patterns, words, stressed and unstressed roles, rhythmic systems, contours of
intonation, and their role in information supply. The fourth is to describe the types of terms that decrease. The fifth is to distinguish words' boundaries, define a word's center, and perceive word order patterns and their meaning.
He also listed five points of the macro-skills of hearing, in addition.
First is the recognition of oral speech of coherent instruments. Secondly, in similar conditions, actors, and priorities, dialogue is understood. Thirdly, the scenario, participants, and priorities should be investigated using real- world expertise. Fourth, outcomes are forecast and connections and relationships between new knowledge, the information supplied, generalizations, case scenarios, concepts, etc. are also outlined. And finally, to explain meanings, it includes voice, body expression, and other nonverbal signals.
It can be inferred from what Solak said above that micro-skills are activities to pay attention to, understand words, establish context, draw conclusions, and communicate. In addition, the tool for distinguishing words from what listeners hear is micro-skills in hearing capacity.
c. Teaching Listening
It is not easy to learn a listening skill since this skill appears to be the most challenging skill for students of foreign languages (Hadijah &
Shalawati, 2016: 70). In addition, an English teacher must be mindful of the challenge of listening encountered by pupils.
Students find it difficult to listen to foreign languages when they struggle to capture any sounds or phrases and miss some major information of the spoken text. Then there is a list of ten hearing difficulties, such as speed of the voice, disruption, words that can not be understood, new vocabulary, next information loss, fear, the difficulty of expression, agitation, anger, and unfamiliar pronunciation. Furthermore, Yilmaz & Yavuz cited seven problems that create difficulties in listening in Underwood (2015): (1) unable to regulate the speaker's tempo, (2) unable to get repetitive material, (3) have a little vocabulary, (4) fail to understand the signal, (5) unable to perceive incoming data, (6) unable to focus, (7) research habits.