CHAPTER II

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

A. The Theoretical Framework

1. The Nature of Listening

Listening is the skill that we use mostly in everyday life. Listening and

hearing are different. Listening is following and understanding the sound, it is

hearing with a purpose. Hearing is an accidental and automatic brain response

to sound that requires no effort.

Listening is an activity of giving attention in order to get some

information of what the speaker are saying. According to Floyed (1985,

p.206), listening is a process entailing hearing, attending, understanding,

evaluating and responding to spoken message. It is called receptive skill, in

which in this activity people decode the meaning of what they listen to.

Listening process is an active participation because the listeners have to cope

the meaning as much as possible.

Listening is the first communication skill we engage in the moment we

are born. It is about how we acquire a language. According to Howat and

Dakin (1974, p.174), listening is the ability to identify and understand what

others said including understanding speaker accent or pronunciation,

grammar, and vocabulary, and grasping the meaning. As the result, listening

10
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is not easy because the listener need to focus to get the meaning from what the

speaker says. Besides, listening is a process interaction a speaker and listener

constructs the meaning with their prior experience and knowledge. The

listeners specifically need to focus and to pay attention on pronunciation,

grammatical rules as well as comprehending of what they listen to.

In listening process, the listeners should pay attention to strategies in

listening. According to Ho (2006, p.25), listening strategies refer to skills or

methods for listeners to directly or indirectly achieve the purpose of listening

comprehension of the spoken input. When students know strategies in

listening, it will make them easier to catch the meaning of what they listen to.

a. Listening Comprehension

Listening comprehension is one of the most important and

fundamental of the four skills in language learning. According to Mee

(1999), listening comprehension is the activity in which listeners can

understand and catch the ideas what they are listening to. It is the process

that analyze sounds, words, clauses, and sentences until getting the

messages of the speakers. In addition, it is often seen as a passive activity

of listening to the speakers’ message.

Based on the statement above, it can be concluded that listening

comprehension is the process in which the listener comprehends,

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understand and catches the meaning or idea what the speaker is talking

about.

a) Type of Listening

According to Nation and Newton (2009, p.40) listening divide

into two types:

1) One-way listening (transactional listening)

This type of listening is associated with the transfer of

information. The process of the information is being transmitted

like the activity of listening to some teaching materials that given

by the teachers.

2) Two-way listening (instructional listening)

This type of listening is associated with keeping the social

relation. It means that two-way listening is the activity of listening

in everyday life such as when people listen to their interlocutor in

order to reply them in conversation.

b) The Strategies of Listening Comprehension

According to Fauzana (2014, p.8), there are some stages in

process listening:

1) Top-Down Strategy

In top down strategy, the listeners go into background

knowledge of the topic, the situation or context the type of text,

and the language (Fauzana, 2014, p.45). This background

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knowledge activates a set of expectation that help the listener to

interpret what is hear and anticipate what will come next. Top

down strategies include listening for the main idea, predicting,

drawing inferences, summarizing. According to Harmer (2008,

p.87), the background knowledge required in top-down process

such as knowing certain things about certain topic and situational

contextual meaning, and knowledge schemata. He also defines,

top down processing foes from meaning to language.

Top-down process is a point of view that sees listening is a

skill that build up from complex skill in which listener use what

they know of communication context-situation which cause

language be used- to predict what the message will contain. This

background knowledge activates a set of expectations that help the

listener to interpret what is heard and anticipate what will come

next.

2) Bottom-up Process

Bottom up process is texts based, the listener relies on the

language in the message, that is combination of sounds, words,

and grammar that creates meaning. Bottom up strategy includes

listening for specific details, recognizing cognates and recognizing

word-order patterns.
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There are several processes in bottom up strategy.

According to Fieldin Paul and Nation (2009, p.156) bottom up

processing involves perceiving and parsing the speech stream at

increasingly larger levels beginning with auditory-phonetic,

phonemic, syllabic, lexical, syntactic, semantic, proposional,

pragmatic and interpretive. In bottom-up processes the listener

relies on the language in the message, that is refers to sound,

words, and grammar that creates the meaning.

3) Pre-Listening

Pre-listening can be called before listening strategy listener.

The listener should be provided with an opportunity to learn how

vocabulary or sentence structures used in the listening material

and a chance to active their prior knowledge.

In this strategy, the listeners need to prepare everything to

get most out of lectures and seminars, they not only need to sit,

listen and think. Pre-Listening can help students to build their

prior knowledge. The teacher could get the students ready to listen

by doing the following instruction in three steps:

1. Help them by doing following:

a. Teach new vocabulary and grammar forms relevant

to material
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b. Translate some words they might not be familiar

with or some sentences difficult to understand.

2. Conduct group discussions for the students to remind

each other:

a. The speaker and the speaker’s possible purpose

b. Students’ purpose for listening to learn specific

information; to understand most all of the message

c. Students’ knowledge/experience with the subject:

think about what they already know about the

subject.

3. Predict what they will be hearing:

a. The format (how the message is organized and

sequence.

b. Key words, phrases or sentences they might expect

to hear.

c. The information or opinion.

4. While Listening

Listening stage is where the listeners need to

pay attention and process the information actively. Use

visual clues to help them understand: setting, the

interaction, facial expression, and gestures. While the

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students are listening they need to monitor their

comprehension by:

a) Check the accuracy of their prediction

b) Deny some predictions and form new ones which

may soon be denied again

c) Decide what is not important to understand.

5. Post listening

This strategy might help you to synthesize,

interpret and evaluate what you have heard. Post

listening embrace all the work related a particular

listening text which is done after the listening is

completed.

6. Metacoqnitive Strategy

Metacoqnitive is being aware of what you know

and do not know, understanding what you will need to

know for a certain task and having an idea of how to

use your current skills to learn what you do not know.

b. Factors which influence Listening Comprehension

There are several factors which influence listening comprehension.

According to Fauzana (2014, p-24-44), there are some factors that

influence in listening process.

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a. Clustering

In clustering, we have to know the classify of the words,

famously call part of speech, such as verb, noun, adjective, adverb,

etc. For example, improve for ‘verb’, improvement for ‘noun’.

b. Redundancy

Redundancy is repetition of the same idea or item of

information within a phrases, clause, or sentence. Redundancy can

occur when the expression contains two (or more) identical or

synonymous words or subexpressions.

Examples:

The green, green grass of home

I had a blue, blue book.

c. Reduced forms

Reduced forms are the spontaneous pronunciation changes in

adjacent words or sounds spoken at a natural speed. Reduced English

sounds (lazy speech) or contractions are two examples. These are all

characteristics of informal spoken English. These are all characteristic

of informal spoken English. The most common contracted forms in

English include the auxiliary verb forms of “be”, “have”, “will”, and
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“would”. Some examples of these forms are “I’m student,” “She’s a

teacher, “They’re in the school.

d. Performance Variable

Native speakers sometimes speak in daily life with

ungrammatical forms. Some of these forms are simple performance

slips, for instance, they arrived in a little town that there was no mall

anywhere, is something a native speaker could easily self correct.

e. Colloquial Language

Colloquialism is the use of informal words, phrase or even

slang. Naturally speakers are bound to add colloquial expressions in

their vocabulary.

f. Rate of Delivery

Rate of delivery is the number and length of pauses used by a

speaker more crucial to comprehension than sheer speed (Richards in

brown). Learners will nevertheless eventually need to be able

comprehend language delivered at varying rates of speed and delivered

with few pauses.

g. Stress, Rhythm and Intonation

Stress is to highlight words which are the speaker wish to

convey. Changing stress can change the meaning of an utterance even

where the words remain the same.

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h. Interaction

Conversation is subject to all the rule of interaction such as,

negotiation, clarification, attending signals, turn taking, and topic

nomination, maintenance, and termination. So the learners have to

learn to responds to continue a chain of listening and responding.

There are a lot of factor that can influence listening

comprehension of students: clustering, redundancy, reduced forms,

performance variable, Colloquial Language, rate of delivery, stress

rhythm and intonation, Interaction. Students should pay attentions what

kind factor that influence in their listening comprehension.

On the other hand cognitive and affective factor also gives

influence in listening comprehension. According to Vandergrift and Goh

(2012, p.354) cognitive factors and affective factors is the most important

factors in listening. Cognitive and affective factors are divided into:

a. Cognitive factors

1) Linguistic knowledge: refers to the knowledge that a student has a

language such as vocabulary knowledge and syntactic

knowledge(grammatical knowledge)

2) Discourse knowledge: sometimes called script knowledge, refers

to awareness of the type of information found in listening texts,

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and how listeners can use the information to facilitate

comprehension.

3) Pragmatic knowledge: involves the application of information

regarding a speaker’s intention that goes beyond the literal

meaning of an utterance.

4) Metacognitive knowledge: refers to the learner’s knowledge and

control of their listening process.

5) Prior knowledge: refers to all knowledge and experience that

learners have.

b. Affective factors

1) Anxiety: refers to the learner’s perception about their listening

ability.

2) Self-efficacy: refers to the learner’s beliefs about their ability to

successfully participate in learning activities.

3) Motivation

There are a lot of factors that impact listening comprehension.

Boyle (1984, p.34) classified the factors that impact listening

comprehension in three ways, they are:

a. Speaker factors: the linguistic ability of the speaker, the quality of the

speech signal, the personality of the speaker

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b. Factors in the oral text: the complexity of the lexis and syntax, the

degree of cohesion

c. Listener factors: intelligence, memory, motivation, background

knowledge

The conclusion is to make students successful in listening

comprehension there are many factors that affected.

2. The Nature of Speaking

Speaking is an active process. According to Cameron in Wahyudi

(2013, p.3), speaking is the active use of language to express meanings so that

other people can make sense of them. In speaking, speaker and listener

emphasize on the meaning what they saying and understand one another.

Speaking is not only producing sounds, but it needs the knowledge of how to

pronounce, to deliver meaning, and to turn ideas into words.

Speaking is not only how we can produce sounds, but how we can

deliver meaning to the listener. According to Kang (2002, p.205), Speaking is

closely related to or interwoven with listening, which is the basic mechanism

through which the rules of language are internalized. In speaking, people put

ideas into words, talking about perception, feeling and intonation. Speaking

becomes essential because it is the skills which people can see directly that the

learners of a language are succeed.

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1. The Ability of Speaking

The ability of speaking is the language skill that is seen as the

evidence and the hallmark of language teaching and learning, and also

how their communication orally and their skill in spoken language

activity directly. According to Hasibuan (2007, p.7), to help students

develop communicative efficiency approach that combines language

input, structured output, and communicative output. He also said

language learners need to organize that speaking involves three areas of

knowledge:

a. Mechanics (pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary): speaking by

using the right order with the correct.

b. Function (transaction and interaction): knowing when clarify of

message is essential (transaction or information exchange) and when

precise understanding is not required (interaction or relationship

building)

c. Social and cultural rules and norms (turn-taking, rate of speech, length

of pause between speakers, relative roles of participants)

2. The Functions of Speaking

Speaking is one of the language skills that is very essential to

support further oral communication.Speaking has several functions.

According Brown and Yule (1983, p.136) states the functions of speaking
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are classified into three kinds; talk as interaction, talk as transaction, and

talk as performance. Based on the statement the function as follows:

a. Talk as Interaction

Talk as interaction refers to conversation and describes

interaction that serves a primarily social function. When people meet

the other people they will interaction each other to talk about

something. The focus is more on the speakers and how they wish to

present themselves to each other than on the message.

b. Talk as Transaction

Talk as transaction refers to situations where the focus is on

what is said or done. The central focus is to make listener understands

the message clearly and accurately.

c. Talk as Performance

Talk as performance refers to public talk, that is, talk that

transmits information before audience, such as classroom presentation,

public announcement, and speech. Talk as performance tends to be in

the form of monologue rather than dialog, often follows recognizable

format, and is closer to written language than conversational language.

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From those explanations, it can be concluded that there are many

functions of speaking. Therefore, it is very useful and valuable to master

oral skill.

3. Analyzing Speaking

There are five components which are generally recognize in

analyzing speaking. According Hughes (2003, p.121), explain those five

aspects as follows:

a. Pronunciation

Pronunciation includes the segmental features of vowels,

consonants, stress, and intonation patterns. Pronunciation is the way of

certain sounds is produced. In communication process, one need to

pronounce and to produce the words uttered clearly and correctly in

order to avoid miscommunication.

b. Grammar

The important thing in speaking is the messages that want to be

conveyed to the listener. Although people do not focus too much on

the grammar of their utterance, it becomes a need that the speakers

also have to notice the grammar itself when speak to others. We must

be acquainted with certain principles and rules constitute what is

collect grammar, it means that without grammar our sentences are not

complete yet.
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c. Vocabulary

In speaking, vocabulary is important thing that the speaker

should have. Vocabulary is a must when someone wants to convey

his/her thoughts, feelings, or views to other people. If people didn’t

mastering in vocabulary they will difficult to deliver message to the

listener. It means that vocabularies are the way to produce something,

the more we know a lot of vocabularies, more we can express what we

think about.

d. Fluency

The fluency of someone when speaking might draw that he or

she is able to speak well. But, it needs to be noticed that intelligibility

of the words pronounced is also important. At the level of someone’s

fluency when speaking, it can be seen whether he or she speaks natural

without some hesitations about what he or she would like to say.

e. Comprehension

The last element of speaking is comprehension.

Comprehension is a key feature in the successful teaching for the

intended meaning of written or spoken communication. It means

speaking not only about how we can speak well, but also how we can

make listener comprehend what speaker talking about.

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Based on the explanation above, it can be concluded that the many

aspects in component speaking, such as pronunciation, grammar,

vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, and each of them is related to each

other.

3. The Correlation between Listening Comprehension and Speaking Ability

Listening is the basic foundation of target language acquisition, and

there is a strong correlation between audio skills with a different language

system. According to Floyed (1985, p.985), listening as a process entailing

hearing, attending, to, understanding, evaluating and responding to spoken

message. It means that listening is key when direct/semi direct test or

speaking performance test cannot be administered for practical reasons,

improving many oral-sub-skills. According to Brown (2004, p.231), People

can connect any language skills, but it is recommendable to mix those that

share the same channel communication, such as Reading-Writing and

Listening-Speaking. When people better in listening, they will be better in

speaking also, because listening and speaking usually happen simultaneously.

Listening is the language skill used most often and the channel

through which students get much of their language input. In addition, students

will absorb the structure and the sound of a sentence at once. Moreover, when

the students get exposures through listening, they will automatically imitate
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and say what they have heard involving the structures of the language they

have heard.

To improve speaking are connective with listening. According

Bozorgian (2012, p.2), proposed three reasons showing the essential role

listening plays to improve speaking skills. First, spoken language provides a

means of interaction for the learner. Because, learner must interact to achieve

understanding, access to speakers of the language is essential. Moreover,

learners’ failure to understand the language they hear is an impetus, not an

obstacle, to interaction and learning. Second, authentic spoken language

presents a challenge for the learner to attempt to understand the language as

native actually use it. Third, listening exercises provide teachers with the

means for drawing learners’ attention to new forms (vocabulary, grammar,

new interaction patterns) in the language. There are a lot of aspects that

influence to students listening and speaking of the students.

Oral and auditory skills are has correlate each other to people

communication each other. Listening is the way of receiving messages from

interlocutor and it also the way of comprehending speech. The message that

are processed are spoken language which produced by the speaker. That is

why listening comprehension correlates to speaking ability.

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B. Relevant research

To avoid the same title in this research, the researcher shows the research

which is relevant to this research. Syafi’i (2014, p.102) stated that relevant

research is previous research conducted by previous researcher that is relevant or

related to a research which a person is conducting. Reviewing the relevant

research is intended to avoid the “plagiarism” toward the design and finding of

the previous researcher. The following relevant researchers to this research

project are.

1. Erickzon D. Astorga-Cabezas (2015)

They conduct a research for education research entitled “The

Relationship between listening proficiency and speaking improvement in

Higher education: consideration in assessing speaking and listening”. The

participant of their research is two course and 60 participants, totaling 120

students and 3 teachers only. The Research question in this research are: First,

both of speaking and listening were studies separately to discuss and affirm

practical and conceptual foundations about the forms in which these skills are

developed and performed in the context of the classroom. Secondly, speaking

and listening were interviewed to appreciate how these skills work together in

the process of second language acquisition and what benefits there may be to

integrating them. Data collection techniques in this research are based on

interviews and pre- and post-test. Once the interviews were conducted with

three English teachers from the institute, the tape recordings were transcribed,
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reviewed, and analyzed. During the first stage of interview analysis, the

transcribed data are inserted into a matrix that is divided into different

categories and subcategories, such as Methodology (class development,

motivation and participation, and resources) and assessment (design and

testing purpose).

After the institute’s English students sat for oral pre- and post-test, an

analysis of final pre- and post-test grades was carried out using statistical

central tendency and dispersion measurements. For the control group, the

mean shows negative progress of two points between the pre (before) and

post (after) tests. This means that in a group of 60 students, their first grade

results were closer to 5.5 than 7.0-the top grade for performance-while their

last results were closer to 5.3 than 7.0. For the experimental group, the mean

shows a positive statistical advance of 9% (4 points of positive progress)

between the pre and post test. The value of this percentage indicates

significant progress of four points in oral language performance. This means

that in a group of 60 students, their first grades were closer to 5.4 than 7.0,

while their last results were closer to 5.8 than 7.0. the results is it was possible

to notice that aural skill influenced oral skills in the Institute’s English

students and the criteria that were improved with listening exercises could be

divided into three categories: highly influenced, somewhat influenced, and

slightly influenced.
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2. Yan Zhang (2009)

They conduct a research for education research entitled: “An

Experimental Study of The Effect of Listening on Speaking for College

Students”. The study was carried out in Qingdao University of Science and

Technology. The participants were all second-year students (n=50) of

Computer Science majors who were grouped into two different groups.

Group 1 (25 students) are the control class, group 2 (25 students) are the

experimental class. The instruments of this research are TSE (test of spoken).

The test is composed 12 questions which fall into seventh categories: namely,

giving directions, recommending places, describing pictures, describing

charts, and graphs, presenting schedule change, performing language function

and talking about topics.

This research used SPSS version 11.5 to compute descriptive statistics

and perform pearson product-moment correlation which is conducted to

investigated the relationship between listening and speaking. The researcher

of this thesis made two opposite hypothesis, which needed to be verified by

quantitative analysis. In the analysis pre-experiment group 2 mean score

(75.20) is a little higher than group 1 (72.52), t< the critical value. In post-

experiment the students in group 2(experimental group) got significant higher

scores than group 1. From the analysis we can conclude that listening does

have some positive effects on improving students oral English.

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3. Hossein Bozorgian( 2012)

They conduct a research for education research entitled: “The

Relationship between listening and other language skills in International

English Language Testing System”. The participants in the study were 701

English for Speakers of Other Language (ESOL) participants, with an age

range of 24-37 in the capital of iran, Tehran, who were planning for either

continuing their collage education of beginning their professional careers in

an English speaking country in summer 2010.

The instruments of this research is IELTS was the only research

instrument used to examine the relationship between listening skill and other

language skill- speaking, reading, and writing in EFL. The candidate received

scores on a Band from 1 (Non User) to 9 (Expert User). Candidates received

a score for each test component-listening, reading, writing, and speaking.

This research used SPSS 18 for windows for the statistical analysis. As

part of descriptive data analysis, and ANOVA, post hoc Comparisons, a

pairwise Correlation Coefficient and a Scatter plot were used to measure the

relationship between listening skill performance and other language skills

performance-speaking, reading and writing as well as the overall

performance. The result displays the descriptive statistic for each language

skill. The lowest attainment is for speaking with a mean of (5.568) and

standard deviation (.889). In contrast, reading with the mean (6.987) and

standard deviation (.789) shows the highest achievement. Listening entailing

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the mean (5.724), standard deviation (.069), the last is reading

comprehension which et al, (2009b) found that there is a high correlation

between the construct measured by IELTS and that of academic reading in

the target space.

C. Operational Concept

Operational concept is the concept used to clarify the theories used in this

research in order to avoid misunderstanding and misinterpretation. According to

Syafi’i (2014, p.103), Operational concept is theoretical concepts on all of the

variables in a research paper that should be operated practically and

operationally.

In this research there are two variables. They are students’ listening

comprehension as independent variable (variable X), students’ speaking ability

as dependent variables (variable Y). To operate the investigation on the variable,

the researcher worked based on the following indicators:

The indicators of variable X or listening comprehension as independent

variables proposed based on the syllabus at the school as followed:

1. Students are able to interpret social function

2. Students are able to identify the contextual meaning

3. Students are able to identify the grammar

4. Students are able to identify the language feature

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The indicators of variable Y (speaking ability) based on components

speaking and type of assessing speaking according to Hughes(2003, p. 111) are

as follows:

1. Students are able to use correct grammar in speaking

2. Students are able to choose vocabulary accurately in expressing oral

language

3. Students are able to comprehend what the speaker says in English

4. Students are able to speak fluently

5. Students are able to pronounce English word well

D. Assumption and Hypothesis

1. Assumption

In this research, the researcher has an assumption related to the

correlation between students’ listening comprehension and their speaking

ability. It is assumed that the better the students’ listening comprehension, the

better their ability in speaking will be.

2. The hypothesis

a. The Null Hypothesis (Ho)

There is no correlation between Students’ Listening Comprehension and

Their Speaking Ability at the State Senior High School 12 Pekanbaru.

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b. The Alternative Hypothesis (Ha)

There is a significant correlation between Students’ Listening

Comprehension and Their Speaking Ability at the State Senior High

School 12 Pekanbaru.