The Listening Comprehension of SMK Students in Demak

Abstract

Listening is a language skill that assists the students to
comprehend spoken language. However, listening is often neglected at
schools in Indonesia due to the system of school curriculum in which
listening to oral English is the skill least taught at school. As a result,
listening becomes a difficult language skill for the students, especially
vocational school students. There are many factors that students have to
cope with in order to comprehend spoken English. To achieve a certain
level of listening comprehension, students have to master micro and
macro skills as mentioned in Brown’s taxonomy in listening
comprehension.
This study proved that there were four major factors that hindered
students’ ability in listening comprehension: sounds, vocabulary,
grammatical awareness and pragmatic differences. It was concluded that
the main cause of the students’ inability to comprehend spoken language
was micro skills, which happened to the students at low level, especially
recognition of word sounds. Accordingly, micro skills should be
introduced to enrich students’ knowledge of language.

Save to Mendeley