A THESIS PROPOSAL
submitted as a fulfillment of the requirements
for getting Master Degree
Department of English Education
By:
Leny Mahdalena
S890908012
GRADUATE SCHOOL
SEBELAS MARET UNIVERSITY
SURAKARTA
2009
IMPROVING STUDENTS’ LISTENING COMPREHENSION
THROUGH TEXT-TO-SPEECH SOFTWARE
(An Action Research at SMAN 4 Sampit
in the 2009/2010 Academic Year)
A THESIS PROPOSAL
By:
Leny Mahdalena
S890908012
Approved by Consultants
TITLE ……………………………………………………………………….. i
CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
A. Background of Study ……………………………………… 1
B. The Identification of the Problem …………………………. 5
C. Limitation of the Problem ………………………………….. 6
D. Problem Statement ………………………………………… 6
E. The Objective of the Research …………………………….. 6
F. Benefits of the Study ……………………………………… 6
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CHAPTER III RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
A. Setting of the Research …………………………………….. 102
1. Time of the Research …………………………………… 102
2. Place of the Research …………………………………… 102
B. Subject of the Research …………………………………….. 103
C. The Method of the Research ………………………………. 104
D. The Model of Action Research ……………………………. 106
E. The Procedures of Action Research ……………………….. 107
F. The Techniques of Collecting the Data ……………………. 110
1. Observation …………………………………………….. 110
2. Content Analysis ……………………………………….. 111
3. Interview ………………………………………………… 112
4. Questionnaire …………………………………………… 112
5. Test ……………………………………………………… 112
G. The Techniques of Analyzing the Data ……………………. 113
1. Qualitative Data …………………………………………. 113
2. Quantitative Data ……………………………………….. 114
H. The Output Measurement ………………………………….. 114
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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
1
2
comprehension. The writer would like provide the students meaningful listening
materials developed by applying the software.
As technological developments came into use, language learning became
more attractive. 'Text to Speech' (Speech synthesis) technology, one of these
technological developments, is basically the process of synthesizing natural sounding
speech from any text via special computer programs. These programs can create the
most realistic, human-sounding synthetic speech which is available today. According
to Kilickaya (2006), Text to Speech' (Speech Synthesis) technology is ready to be
deployed in the second language education and instructors should be willing to
explore possible uses of this technology. In line with it, González (2007: 1) states,
“Text-to-speech (TTS) applications found on the Internet can be incorporated to our
lessons to help students listen to any written text to check its pronunciation and
intonation.”
Corresponding to the development of science, technology, and art, Badan
Standar Nasional Pendidikan, the agency of national education, (2006: 6) declares:
“Kurikulum dikembangkan atas dasar kesadaran bahwa ilmu pengetahuan,
teknologi dan seni yang berkembang secara dinamis. Oleh karena itu,
semangat dan isi kurikulum memberikan pengalaman belajar peserta didik
untuk mengikuti dan memanfaatkan perkembangan ilmu pengetahuan,
teknologi, dan seni”.
Based on the background of the study, there are some problems that arise.
The problems identified are as follows:
1. The teacher tends to test listening comprehension rather than teach listening
skill.
2. The teacher usually applies lecturing method in teaching listening skill.
6
Derived from the problems identified above, the writer focuses on how to
improve the students‟ listening comprehension, especially listening comprehension
of the tenth grader.
D. Problem Statement
This study will prove beneficial to the process of English language teaching
learning, especially in the teaching of listening comprehension. The integration of
Text-to-Speech software in particular and Computer Assisted Language Learning
will prove beneficial to the improvement of the students‟ listening comprehension in
particular and four language skills in general.
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1. For the writer, it will be a fruitful journey to explore her own teaching
experience and broaden the horizon of her English language teaching.
2. For the students, they can improve their listening comprehension and can
use it to receive input and data in language learning.
3. For other teachers, they get inspired to teach English through Computer
Assisted Language Learning. In this research, Text-to-Speech software is
applied to improve listening comprehension. There are many possibilities to
explore in Computer Assisted Language Learning.
4. For the school, it will provide valuable information for the improvement of
English Language Teaching.
5. For other researchers, it can be a reference for further similar studies.
CHAPTER II
A. Listening Comprehension
1. Definitions of Listening
Definitions of listening, ranging from the simple to the expansive, have been
proposed by various scholars. Rankin (1952) in Thanajaro (2000: 11) defined
listening as "… the ability to understand spoken language". Another expanded
definition also cited by her is Johnson (1951)‟s definition which goes "… the ability
to understand and respond effectively to oral communication". Additionally she
quotes Jones (1956) who defines that listening is as a selective process by which
sounds communicated by some source are received, critically interpreted, and acted
upon by a purposeful listener. Nichols (1974: 83) shortened the definition of listening
to "the attachment of meaning to aural symbols". In addition to this, Underwood
(1989: 1) simplified the definition of listening to "the activity of paying attention to
and trying to get meaning from something we hear". Lastly, Purdy (1997: 8) defined
listening as "the active and dynamic process of attending, perceiving, interpreting,
8
9
Research has shown that listening is not a passive process. Postovsky (1977:
9) points out that listening is not a passive skill and it requires full participation and
the undivided attention of the learners. In addition, he states that when the nature of
the skill is understood, the process becomes exciting. Vandergrift (1999: 168) is
with him by rejecting the treatment of listening comprehension as a passive skill and
states:
“Listening comprehension is anything but a passive activity. It is a complex,
active process in which the listener must discriminate between sounds,
understand vocabulary and grammatical structures, interpret stress and
intonation, retain what was gathered in all of the above, and interpret it within
the immediate as well as the large sociocultural content of the utterance. Co-
ordinating all of this involves a great deal of mental activity on the part of the
listener. Listening is hard work, and deserves more analysis and support”.
Holtzer (2003: 373) also points out that listening is very different from
hearing in that it is a very active skill which requires listeners to apply several
functions each time that they receive messages. He proposes the following listening
components:
Listening involves processing phonetic language information and
constructing a message from a stream of sounds, based on listeners‟ syntactic,
10
phonetic and semantic knowledge of the language. That is, listeners can
receive messages conveyed to their ears as sound waves pass through the
medium of auditory organs. However, if they do not know the semiotic
system of the language, even though a message is conveyed to the brain,
listeners cannot decipher the message. Listeners cannot reconstruct speakers‟
messages and understand the messages until they come to possess a semiotic
system like that contained in the speakers‟ language, with which to
communicate mutually. In this way, listening is a very active behaviour, and
is quite different from „hearing‟, which is the activity of just receiving sound
waves”.
who unpacks the meaning from the sentences. That is, as much as we want to, we
cannot put ideas in student's heads, they will and must construct their own meanings.
From the review, it can be seen that listening comprehension is actually
dynamic and a complex process. It requires an active role of learners in applying
their background history together with linguistic knowledge at the same time when
they construct the meaning of the listening texts that they receive, which is along the
same line as Constructivist theory. It puts more emphasis on the active side of
learners. In fact, learners are the ones who actively construct the meaning of texts
and each learner would interpret the listening texts differently depending on their
own background. In order to promote listening comprehension, teaching and learning
practice should, therefore, place more emphasis on learners by providing them with
environments or opportunities to confront with texts in their own ways and construct
their own meanings. They should be empowered to have control over their own
learning process in order to be successful in listening.
both teachers and learners in second and foreign language in all educational levels in
many countries including Indonesia. It is the least stressed or focused on skill in the
language classroom and receives the least pedagogical attention. Pearson and
Fielding (1982: 625-626) remark on the general neglect in listening comprehension:
“We do not understand why there is so little attention paid to listening
comprehension as a matter for a school curriculum when students spend so
much time listening. We would like to see more emphasis given to listening
comprehension as an entity in its own right”.
Although the preceding comment was made several years ago, the minimal
attention paid to listening comprehension still persists. Most of the teachers of
English can point out the history of extensive instructional focus on the expressive
areas of language use or speaking and the comparative neglect of the receptive areas
like listening – even though it is clear that the receptive skills are used more than
twice as much as the expressive skills.
Listening comprehension often plays only a trivial role in foreign language
teaching and learning environments despite the fact that it often figures prominently
in curricular guidelines and statements of objectives. It is always included as one of
the main objectives in the curriculum that students need to acquire but in practice it
usually receives little attention. This statement proves true as many teachers of
English as a foreign language in Indonesia in general and in the province of Central
Kalimantan in particular pay very little attention to the area of teaching listening
comprehension for some reasons.
In fact, listening skills are very important but relatively few research projects
are carried out in this area. In addition, it is widely believed that listening skills are
enabling skills that can happen on their own. Some teachers also believe that if
students are efficiently taught and trained in reading and speaking skills, they would
acquire these skills and as a consequence their listening skills will be improved too.
Furthermore, listening skills are viewed as developing automatically without any aid
or teaching. The only thing that students require is repeated listening or large doses
of listening and they would acquire the skills on their own without any teacher help.
Brown (1990: 8) also points out that it is assumed in teaching that students would
20
easily acquire the ability to understand the spoken language if they hear their
teachers speaking or listen to a tape. He further clarifies:
“For many years it was suggested that students would learn to understand the
spoken form of the language simply by being exposed to it. Many courses
which purport to „teach‟ listening comprehension in fact consist of exercises
which expose the students to a chunk of spoken material on a tape and then
ask „comprehension questions‟ to try to find out whether or not the student
has understood the language of the text. …The students are not receiving any
help in learning”.
Furthermore, Scarcella and Oxford (1992: 140) indicate that the reason that
listening is often neglected in language instruction is that: “The concept, shared by
other authorities, seems to be that listening comprehension simply takes care of itself
without any aid or teaching, and that osmosis is all that needed.” Hedge (2000: 227)
also states a misconception of listening comprehension in the English language
teaching curriculum, “Certainly some ELT methods have assumed that listening
ability will develop automatically through exposure to the language and through
practice of grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation.”
In fact, listening comprehension needs more attention from both teachers and
students. It is actually an important skill and the most frequently used; it plays an
important role in everyday life. Morley (1984: 7) also mentions the proportion of the
listening in daily life:
“Listening is the most frequently employed skill in daily language use.
Research results vary slightly, depending upon the groups studied, but on the
average, time spent in communicating divides into approximately 50 percent
listening, 25 percent speaking, 15 percent reading, and 10 percent writing”.
Scarcella and Oxford (1992: 139) simply mention a similar trend of listening
comprehension that it occupies more than half of the time spent by college students
in lectures. Powers (1985) reports that listening skills actually play a crucially
important role in one‟s academic success.
It is clear that listening comprehension is an essential skill to be acquired and
should not be taken for granted in the foreign or second language teaching and
learning environment. The ability to listen cannot be transferred from teaching of
other skills. In order to prevent listening comprehension from being treated like the
„Cinderella‟ skill, as Nunan (1999) calls it, listening comprehension should be given
21
time and attention in the classroom and this should be done from the very beginning
and throughout the students‟ academic lives. It should not be treated as a by-product
skill in the learning environment.
It is clear that a method refers to a more focused path than an approach since
it is more prescriptive and leaves little or no room for interpretation by teachers.
The Direct method is a revolution from the old teaching method which draws
on first language of the learners in the teaching environment. This method is based
upon the concept that second language learning is similar to first language learning.
Second language learning is then created to be close to first language learning by
exposing learners to oral language as much as possible in order to simulate the
conditions under which children learn their first language. Stern (1983: 459)
mentions that the learning of languages is viewed as analogous to first language
acquisition.
In this method, the first language of the learners is totally avoided. This
contrasts significantly with the traditional teaching method. The Direct method holds
that second language learning is improved when the language itself is practiced and
applied frequently. As a result, emphasis is on using the second language as much as
possible in the classroom situation. Translation into the first language is prohibited
since it is believed to hinder the learning process of the second language.
Because of the forbidden use of the first language and translation in the
classroom, learning and teaching is carried out through the use of demonstrations and
visual aids in order to help learners understand the concepts that teachers try to
convey to them. The name „Direct method‟ implies that meaning is delivered directly
from teachers to students in the target language through the use of demonstrations
because the students‟ native language is absolutely forbidden and excluded in the
teaching and learning process. Larsen-Freeman (2000: 27) also highlights the essence
of teaching conducted in this method: “Objects (e.g. realia or pictures) present in the
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the lesson. Richards and Rodgers (2001: 10) mention that listening comprehension
was taken care of in the Direct Method.
Rivers (1981: 33) again clarifies characteristics of listening sources delivered
to students as follows:
“From the beginning, the students were accustomed to hear complete,
meaningful sentences which formed part of a simple discourse, often in the
form of a question-answer exchange or an anecdote recounted by the
teacher.”
statements were followed by related questions such as, “Where are you
going?” and later still by questions to class members such as, “Where is he
going?/Where did he go?” Unfortunately, however, all the statements used
were related to the classroom. Teachers did not generally think of students
using language beyond the classroom. Any connection with real life was
expected to come later and was not the business of the school.” (pp. 5-6)
certain period of time with a lot of advocates, its popularity began to fade by the end
of the 1960s (Richards and Rodgers, 2001: 59).
The Audio-lingual Method prioritizes listening and speaking and follows up
with the introduction of reading and writing. As a result, new material is always
presented in dialog forms through tape recorders or teachers. Students in this
teaching environment usually listen to dialogs and repeat the dialogs. They have to
memorize the conversations and extensively repeat the patterns until they can
produce the whole passage without any errors. Rivers (1981: 43-44) describes this
teaching method as follows:
“…learning is based on dialogues containing commonly used everyday
expressions and basic structures of high frequency.…The dialogues are
learned by a process of mimicry-memorization, …Students learn the dialogue
sentences by heart one by one. First they listen carefully to the teacher, or a
native model on tape, until they can distinguish the sounds and intonation of
the phrase to be learned. Then they repeat the phrase after the model until
they are repeating it accurately and fluently.”
The dangers of this teaching method lays on the fact that students may
progress like well-trained parrots with the ability to repeat whole utterances perfectly
when they are provided with a certain stimulus. They may be uncertain of the
meaning of the sentences that they are delivering. Furthermore, they are at the risk of
being unable to use memorized words or sentences in their heads in contexts other
than those in which they have been trained to perform successfully. Brown (2000:
88) also points out the focus on the manipulation of language form and the disregard
of content in the method. Krashen (1995: 131) further demonstrates a drawback of
the audio-lingual method in terms of listening comprehension:
“While the presentation of a dialogue, for example, may take up a full period,
students spend very little of this time focusing on the message, which is
presented over and over. The goal is the memorization of the dialogue, not
the comprehension of a message. …The applicability of dialogues to free
conversation and to genuine conversational management may be limited, …
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Most dialogues are actually scripts, and are not designed to be used to
negotiate meaning.”
It could be said that teaching of listening comprehension does not seem to put
an emphasis on allowing learners to understand the meaning of the dialogs or
sentences they hear. It only tends to create or produce learners who possess
unconscious habits in generating sentence after sentence without any real
understanding. It seems to turn them into machines which record and then reproduce
what they have heard without thinking about the involved meanings. This may cause
a tremendous problem when learners taught through this method have to function in
real life situations where conversation does not occur according to the format of
pattern drills in the classroom and where meanings become necessary in a process of
negotiation. Actually, the dialog provided for them should contain characteristics of
natural speech so that they become accustomed to them when they have to function
in real life. The meanings of the conversations should also receive attention and be
introduced to learners.
It can be said that this teaching approach is the product of educators not quite
satisfied with the former teaching methods such as the Audio-lingual method. This is
due to the inability of the previous methods to prepare learners for interpretation,
expression and negotiation of meaning. They see that learners seem to be able to
function effectively in the classroom but seem to be handicapped in real life
situations. Learners can regurgitate all grammatical rules by heart but they cannot
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the language in this way, they will then learn it because it supports the idea that
knowing generally results from doing and interacting with the real world.
Richards and Rodgers (2001: 72) state that the communicative language
teaching approach can be said to derive from three different theoretical premises: the
communicative principle, which encourages the activities that involve
communication; the task principle, which involves the completion of real world
tasks; and the meaningfulness principle, which requires learners to engage in
meaningful and authentic language use. Fluency in communication rather than
accuracy is emphasized in this approach; therefore, errors are tolerated and not seen
as a bad habit which would become permanent in the learners‟ systems. Larsen-
Freeman (2000: 127) indicates that errors are not a focus in the classroom because
they are seen as a natural outcome of the development of communication skills.
Teachers will not immediately intervene and try to correct the errors produced by the
students during an activity. They might note them down and return to discuss the
errors at a later point of the class time instead. This practice is unlike that of the
Audio-lingual method which regards errors as a bad habit which must be avoided and
taken care of instantly because it forms a bad tendency in learners and will
eventually prevent acquisition of language, which is the main objective of language
learning.
In this teaching approach, listening and speaking skills are focused upon. It is
mentioned that learners have an opportunity to listen to authentic or real life dialogs
or texts that they have to encounter when they are to be in real situations in the target
language. According to Bacon (2004), students in communicative language teaching
are exposed to real life situations, for example buying food at the supermarket or
asking someone for directions. They have a lot of opportunities to be exposed to
everyday and authentic language. Galloway (1993: 7) is of the opinion that the
Communicative Language Teaching approach makes uses of real-life situations that
necessitate communication and the teachers set up a situation that students are likely
to encounter in real life.
It can be said that the approach makes an effort to bring learners in closer
contact with authentic language examples while also promoting fluency. They have
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It can be said that in the classroom with this kind of teaching approach,
listening for meaning is also a focus. Learners are required to listen to target
language texts from tapes or videos and then they are expected to answer some
comprehension questions in order to demonstrate how well they can understand or
interpret the text. The questions used in judging the students‟ comprehension may be
presented in either an open-ended or multiple choice format. The listening texts
33
acquisition. In fact, it might actually create negative effects on motivation and also
embarrass learners in the classroom. Consequently, it should be avoided at all costs.
The approach focuses on communication abilities. An attempt to promote
acquisition rather than learning is also one of the major principles. It is believed that
acquired knowledge is responsible for the automatic ability to communicate with
others, whereas learned knowledge is composed of grammatical rules that learners
consciously apply when they use the language in communication. The learners would
be able to use this learned knowledge to monitor their speech in communication only
when they are provided with time to think about and apply the rules they have learnt.
They also have to focus on form or correctness in using learned knowledge in
communication. However, learned knowledge cannot be transformed into acquired
knowledge; therefore, class time should mainly be designed to promote acquired
knowledge rather than learned knowledge. Acquired knowledge would occur when
the learners understand the input with which they are faced. As a result, it is the
teachers‟ responsibilities to provide comprehensible input to the learners during the
classroom time.
In addition, comprehensible input should be provided for the students in a
large amount and frequently enough in order to help promote acquisition. Krashen
(1995: 138) states that the entire goal of classroom practice in the Natural Approach
is to provide comprehensible input. It is also suggested that acquisition of
grammatical structures of the second language proceeds in a predictable order. No
matter what the teachers teach the learners, they seem to acquire the grammatical
items in a specific order. Unfortunately, there is no clear set for that order provided
so far in the second language teaching area. It is also the teachers‟ responsibility to
create a relaxing and friendly learning environment in the classroom. Classroom
experience should be interesting and motivating for the students. They should not be
placed in high-anxiety contexts or receive a lot of pressure because their affective
filter will be up and this can prevent the acquisition process from occurring.
Listening comprehension seems to be given much attention in this teaching
approach. Richards and Rodgers (2001: 183) affirm that the focus in the classroom
should be on listening and reading. It is claimed that learners would have an
35
that speakers try to send across to them. This is because the contrived input does not
contain the same characteristics that real input does. Consequently, although
listening comprehension is claimed to be taken care of in this teaching approach,
learners might not actually be prepared to function effectively and efficiently in real
life communication because of the tremendous doses of simplified input they
generally receive.
e. Inference
during the „reform movement‟ of the early 1900s. However, he explains that over the
past fifty years, methods for the development of listening instruction have evolved
very slowly and do not subscribe to any one philosophy or theory of learning or
teaching as previously discussed.
Normally, teachers are the ones who are in control of the amount of time the
tape recorder/ CD player is played, and the point at which it should be stopped,
especially in large classes. The common practice is that students can hear a listening
text around three times. They will hear the text in the first round from the beginning
through the end and then they are given time to answer the comprehension questions.
After that the teachers play the tape again for them to check their answers against the
text.
In some classrooms, teachers will stop from time to time when they play the
tape recorder in order to reduce the information that students have to process. This is
believed to help students in answering the comprehension questions. Nunan (1990:
18) describes a technique in teaching listening comprehension:
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“The teacher plays a recorded text while the students listen and complete an
activity such as tracing a route on a map. The teacher pauses at certain points
as indicated in the tapescript, and the students are able to discuss the task.
The students can also request the teacher to stop the tape at any point so they
can discuss the task.”
Although students can request teachers to stop the tape when they want, in
practice they hardly do that. Most students hardly say anything to modify the
teachers‟ practice because it is believed that the teachers are the body of knowledge
and the knowledge givers. This is very common among Indonesian students who
never or hardly ever question their teachers. They will simply do whatever their
teachers tell them to do. Teachers are the authorities in the classroom so the teachers
are always in control of the start and stop point of the tape. Although teachers may
stop at the points where they foresee that learners may have difficulties, some
students may not want the teachers to stop at those particular points. They may want
the teachers to stop or repeat at some other points that teachers may think are very
easy for them.
It can be clearly seen that this common practice is very teacher controlled and
directed. Students rarely have control over the learning process. They do not have a
part in making decisions about their own learning. They have to follow the path and
pace that their teachers set for them. In reality, learners differ in how they deal with
listening texts because they deal with the texts to construct the meaning depending
on their historical background. By managing the classroom in the above procedure,
teachers seem to ignore the differences in learners and try to make all learners the
same.
passage without any help from them except being the persons who push the play,
pause and stop buttons. It may result from the belief that learning to listen involves
having access to a massive amount of aural input.
Rost (2002: 168) also points out that one means of achieving greater
comprehension which is preferable and typically much easier to administer is for
teachers to repeat the text by replaying the audio or video extract or repeating the text
orally. The practice of the listening comprehension classes, according to Field (1998:
111), is that a conventional listening comprehension lesson simply adds yet another
text to the learner‟s experience but it does little or nothing to improve the
effectiveness of their listening or to address their shortcoming as listeners.
Rivers (1980: 141) asserts that as a learner hears much foreign-language
speech, he eventually acquires facility in recognizing the crucial elements which
determine the message. Finocchiaro and Brumfit (1983: 137) also mention that:
To aid the students in retaining increasingly longer sentences and later in
producing these longer segments, they may listen to the same material many
times. As they hear the same piece of speech the fourth or fifth time, they will
anticipate and “supplement” the sounds and sound sequences they are about
to hear.
However, playing the texts many times might not help learners at all because
they may still not be able to comprehend the texts after they have listened to the texts
more than ten times. It is possible for them to hear the repeated input over and over
again but not to understand the text at all. Therefore, it seems that providing learners
with heavy doses of listening without any extra help does not guarantee that they will
eventually acquire the listening ability.
d. Text Provision
repeats the reading. It is also believed that students can better understand longer texts
when they both read and listen to the material than when they can only listen.
The act of systematically providing texts to students in the first or second
round of their listening may seem to suggest that they could understand the texts
better and result in an ability to answer more comprehension questions correctly.
They are made to believe that they possess listening skills. However, if the issue is
carefully considered, it can be said that they might not actually be practicing
listening skills. They are, instead, working on their reading skills. As a result, when
they have to be in real life communication, they fail to understand what is going on
around them because they are not provided with a transcription to follow. They are
lured to believe by the system that they could comprehend everything in the
classroom but when faced with real communication, they experience a lot of
difficulty and may not understand anything.
e. Testing or Teaching?
The term, „hearing‟ and „listening‟, are sometimes used interchangeably but
actually they are quite different. According to Holtzer (2003: 373) listening involves
processing phonetic language information and constructing a message from a stream
of sounds, based on listeners‟ syntactic, phonetic and semantic knowledge of the
43
language. That is, listeners can receive messages conveyed to their ears as sound
waves pass through the medium of auditory organs. However, if they do not know
the semiotic system of the language, even though a message is conveyed to the brain,
listeners cannot decipher the message. Listeners cannot reconstruct speakers‟
messages and understand the messages until they come to possess a semiotic system
like that contained in the speakers‟ language, with which to communicate mutually.
In this way, listening is a very active behaviour, and is quite different from „hearing‟,
which is the activity of just receiving sound waves.
The difficulties or problems encountered while listeners deal with listening
comprehension could derive from several different factors. The following sections
will cover the major factors which contribute to difficulties or ease in listening
comprehension. They include historical background, learning styles, learning
strategies, strategy training, memory span, task and text features.
a. Individual Differences
Learners in either the second or foreign language classroom do not come into
class like a blank sheet. Each learner is a product of his/her own background.
Therefore, they come to class bringing their own experience or historical background
with them. They actively make use of this background in dealing with the experience
in the classroom. This also happens in listening activities. Teachers present them
with listening texts and they usually confront with the texts and construct meaning
based upon their historical background. As a result, each learner generally interacts
with the listening texts differently depending on their own historical background.
They make sense of the listening texts differently. It can be said that no two learners
process making sense of texts the same way. This concept is clearly proposed by
Pierre Bourdieu. He coined a term called „habitus‟. Wacquant (2004: 15) explains the
root of the term „habitus‟ in the following way:
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According to Wikepedia (2004, para. 9), the definition of the word „habitus‟
is:
“…a concept defined by Pierre Bourdieu, [which] refers to the total ideational
environment of a person. This includes the person‟s beliefs and dispositions,
and prefigures everything that that person may choose to do.”
The concept of „habitus‟ is further clarified: “… a person relies upon a large
store of scripts and a large store of knowledge, which present that person with a
certain picture of the world and how she or he thinks to behave within it.” (para. 11)
Habitus is the result of the subject‟s exposure to social processes. It shapes an
individual and influences the way the individual interacts with society or
environment around them. Habitus is not fixed but it can be eroded, countered, or
even dismantled by exposure to novel external forces (Wacquant, 2004). Pallos
(2002) also mentions that habitus regulates human practices and behavior. It can be
said that learners deal with things around them based on their past experience, which
moulded or formed them. The idea of „habitus‟ clearly supports the idea that each
person does not do anything totally out of his/her own free will. Each person
interacts with the environment from their own background. Besides, it is pointed out
that each individual‟s habitus is different to some degree because it is very rarely that
two biographies are exactly the same (Department of Anthropology, 2004).
Therefore, it can be said that learners as individual agents construct the meaning of
the listening texts by dealing with the texts differently depending upon their
background. No learner follows the same path of constructing meaning of the texts.
The influence of the historical background upon the way in which learners
cope with listening texts is also put forward by Brown (1990: 9). He declares that
different individuals paid attention to different points which meshed with their own
previous experience and interests in different ways. Human beings each have a
unique experience of life behind them, a unique cast of mind, a unique set of
45
interests. He further emphasizes that no two individual students learn in the same
manner.
Meaning, created from listening, will depend upon the learners‟ socio-
historical background. Each learner will interact with the listening text differently
depending on their accumulated understandings and internal logics. This will
strongly influence the way meaning will be generated by the listeners. According to
Wallace as cited by Wu-ping (2006: 28), listeners integrate the new information from
the text into their pre-existing schemata (background knowledge and global
understanding). At this point, a listener‟s comprehension depends on his or her
ability to relate the information that he/ she gets from the text with pre-existing
knowledge.
It can be said that learners are moulded by their own socio-historical
background. They do not come into class like a white cloth. Their ways of thinking
or actions are influenced by their own historical background or framed by their
habitus as Bourdieu calls it. This also affects the ways they deal with listening
activities. They interact with the listening texts in their own way based upon the
historical background of which they are the product. However, this trend is easily
ignored by several teachers. Many teachers firmly believe that learners learn in the
same way. As a result, materials seem to be presented in the same manner. A lesson
plan is created before the class time and teachers strictly follow it in order to
accomplish teaching goals stated in that lesson. Learners are thought to have the
same means of acquiring the same knowledge. Teachers always impose the way
learners deal with their learning by making them follow the path and pace generally
set up for them. This practice should be stopped if the aim is to help learners better
their listening comprehension.
2) Learning Styles
It can be said that each learner tackles or deals with language tasks in
different ways. They tend to cope with learning by employing the way that they feel
comfortable with and works for them. Some of them seem to learn well and feel
46
relaxed when they can listen to or hear the new vocabulary items while some of them
can grasp the concept easily and quickly by seeing the typed forms of the items in
front of them. Some need a lot of time to think about the new concept presented
while some tend to leap to conclusions quickly. Each learner tends to have different
ways of collecting and organizing information for their own processing systems. This
results from the way they are brought up or their historical background,
environmental demands around them, culture, school systems they are in, etc. For
example, some learners prefer to see new information presented to them more than
other students do. They like to be able to read and receive visual input. Although
sometimes it is true that learners may employ both approaches such as listening and
seeing in learning a new thing, they seem to have a tendency in frequently using a
particular style over another in processing and integrating with what they are
confronting. This is what scholars call „learning styles‟.
It is clear that learning styles are the general processes or ways that each
individual brings in when they deal with new information. These styles seem to be
consistent within each learner. They seem to influence learners to prefer one
classroom environment over another. Learners with a certain learning style will be
successful in a particular teaching environment. As a result, teachers should find
ways of taking account of differences in learning style. This should include the
teaching of listening comprehension as listeners construct the meaning of texts
differently by utilizing their own learning styles. The issue of learning styles is of
interest among second/foreign language teachers because it seems to influence the
success or failure of learners. As a result, several scholars have become keenly
interested in learning styles and have divided them into many categories. The writer
will now discuss some of the major categories as they relate to the teaching and
learning of the second/foreign languages.
Based upon the work and model proposed by Felder and Silverman in 1988,
Felder and Henriques (1995) point out that there are five dichotomous learning style
dimensions: sensing and intuitive; visual and verbal; active and reflective;
sequential and global; and inductive and deductive.
First, sensors or sensing learners seem to gather data through their senses.
They like to observe information. They seem to be concrete and methodical. They
tend to like facts and experiments. They like to deal with details and like to follow
rules and standard procedures. Careful but slow are the main characteristics of
sensing learners. On the other hand, intuitors or intuitive learners are very abstract
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and imaginative. They are good at principles, concepts and theories. They do not like
details but prefer complicated problems. They do not like repetition and
memorization but learn well with a variety of tasks. They can be categorized as quick
learners but they may be very careless.
Second, visual learners learn well when the information is presented to them
visually such as in pictures, films, demonstrations. Verbal learners prefer to receive
spoken or written explanations when they deal with new information. Both seem to
be on the opposite ends in dealing with new information.
Third, active learners like to be involved in doing something in the external
world with the information. They like discussing, explaining, or testing new
information in some ways. As a result, they learn well in the environments that
enable them to do things physically such as group work. In contrast, reflective
learners like to examine and manipulate the information introspectively. They learn
well in the situations that allow them to think carefully about the information
presented to them before they decide to act on it.
Fourth, sequential learners are good at perceiving and understanding
information that is in small, connected chunks. They, as a result, can function well
with incomplete understanding of materials but they may have difficulties viewing
the broad context of a body of knowledge. Global learners, on the contrary, tend to
achieve understanding of a whole picture from unconnected fragments or randomly
ordered information. They need to master the total picture of the information before
they are able to see any connection between each minute detail of a subject. They
may seem to be slow at the beginning of the learning process because they need to
understand the total picture first.
Fifth, inductive learners make an observation and come up with governing or
correlating principles. They proceed from small pieces of information or details like
data to generalities like rules or theories. In contrast, deductive learners will process
information in an opposite direction. They start with principles or rules and
consequently deduce details. Learners may tend to prefer deductive presentations
because information is presented in a high level of structure. The Grammar
Translation method, one of the very first teaching methods, is a good example of the
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deductive approach while the Direct method, the Audio-lingual method and the
Communicative Language Teaching approach best represent the inductive style.
The second major model of learning styles is called Kolb‟s learning styles.
Kolb and colleagues as cited by Frisby (2006: 294) describe two bipolar dimensions
that underlie differences in learning style: an approach to a task (i.e. preferring to do
or to watch) and an emotional response (i.e. preferring to think or feel). The two-line
axis is presented below:
Figure 2. 1 Kolb‟s two line axis
Feeling
Doing Watching
Thinking
Chapman (2001) mentions that from Kolb‟s two line axis, Kolb generates
four different learning styles: activist, reflector, theorist, and pragmatist. Activists are
hands-on people. They rely on intuition rather than logic. They like practical and
experiential approaches. Reflective learners or reflectors prefer to observe rather than
act on something. They tend to gather information and use imagination to solve
problems. Theorists are very concise and logical. They learn well when they receive
good clear and organized explanations rather than practical opportunities. Ideas and
concepts are important to them. Pragmatists are not concerned with interpersonal
aspects. They prefer well-defined and technical tasks and can use learning to apply to
finding solutions to practical issues. The four types of learning styles are located
differently on the two axes, as shown below:
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Dunning (2008: 601) categorizes the types of teachers that can accommodate
each learning style. In order to benefit activists, teachers should step away and
maximize opportunities for the students to discover information for themselves. To
accommodate reflectors, teachers should play the role of motivator. To promote
learners to learn effectively, teachers should function as an expert for theorists,
whereas they should provide guided practice and feedback and act like a coach for
pragmatists.
The third model of learning styles or the Myers Briggs Type Indicator
(MBTI) is based on Carl Jung‟s theory of psychological types. Carl Jung, a Swiss
psychologist, established a field identifying various personality patterns in the early
1900s (Blumentritt, 2008: 781). The Myers Briggs Type Indicator divides learners
into four dichotomous dimensions: extroversion and introversion; sensing and
intuition; thinking and feeling; and judging and perceptive (Clark, 2000).
The first dichotomy refers to the way learners direct their attention towards
the external or internal world. Extroverts prefer to interact with people and tend to be
action-oriented. They prefer to talk more than listen. On the other hand, introverts
tend to be reflective thinkers. They think or listen quietly rather than talk. They want
to develop frameworks that connect the information that they learn.
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The fourth learning style model is based on the work of Howard Gardner,
who is a psychologist. In this model, learning styles are generally divided into seven
types: linguistic, logical, spatial, musical, bodily, interpersonal, and intrapersonal
(Mantle, 2001). Linguistic learners are good at memorizing and remembering trivial
information. They learn best by saying, hearing and seeing words. Logical learners
enjoy solving problems. They are very logical and straight-forward. They can learn
best by categorizing, classifying, and working with abstract patterns. Spatial learners
are visualizers. They can learn best with pictures or things on paper. Musical learners
are good at noticing details, pitches, and rhythms. Bodily learners are very active.
They can learn well when they can touch things. Interpersonal learners learn well
when they can interact, relate, and share with other people such as in group work
activity. They are very patient, empathetic, and understanding. Intrapersonal
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students are very independent and tend to learn well if they are alone. They prefer
individualized projects.
Rodgers (2001) explains some educational activities which seem to be
appropriate for each learning style. Linguistic learners can learn well in lectures and
debates while logical learners seem to function well in problem solving and puzzles.
Spatial learners can benefit greatly from charts, films, and diagrams, whereas
musical learners seem to look forward to participating in poetry and jazz chants.
Learners with bodily learning styles are good at hands-on activities, craft, and
demonstrations. Interpersonal learners seem to do well in group work, peer tutoring,
and class projects and intrapersonal learners prefer to get involved with activities that
require reflection from them and allow them to work on their own.
Brown (2000: 114 - 22) points out some of the learning styles that are
potentially important contributors in learning a language. They include field
independence and field dependence; left-brain and right-brain functioning; tolerance
and intolerance of ambiguity; reflectivity and impulsivity; and visual and auditory
styles.
First, field independent learners can perceive details in a field of distracting
items. They can distinguish parts from a whole and concentrate on individual items.
They tend to be competitive and self-confident. Field dependent learners, on the
other hand, tend to depend on the total or whole picture so the individual parts
embedded in the field are not easily perceived by them. This type of learner is
empathetic and sensitive to the feelings of others.
Second, left-brain functioning learners are good at verbal instructions and
explanations. They are planned and structured learners. As a result, they prefer
established and certain information when they face new information. In contrast,
right-brain functioning learners respond well to demonstrated, illustrated, and
symbolic instructions. They are not structured but fluid. They prefer elusive and
uncertain information. They can perform well even when the situation is changing.
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It can be seen that there are several models of learning style proposed by
various scholars. This makes the issue very complicated and fragmented. Various
researchers conducted research and put different labels or terms for each learning
style. Some of them are very close to each other while some seem to overlap with the
others. Although the categories in each model are not exactly the same, some
categories in different models seem to share common characteristics. For example,
sequential and global learning styles in Felder‟s model seem to possess some
commonalities with left-brain and right-brain functioning in Brown‟s categories. A
summary of each model is provided in Table F.1.
Although the categories or labels coined for use with each learning style may
overlap or be mixed, it can be clearly seen that each learner possesses different
styles. They bring in different styles in perceiving, processing and retaining new
information that comes to them including when they deal with listening
comprehension. Teachers in general classroom situations seem to be able to
accommodate each learning style at a time or do their best to support the styles that
most learners in the classroom possess. Some of them try to define their students‟
learning styles and set up a lesson activity that can cater for that particular style. It
might be very difficult for teachers to accommodate several learning styles at the
same time in a normal classroom situation. As a result, they tend to force their
students to apply a similar learning style at a particular time in a particular lesson so
they can accommodate that style and the learners will be able to learn successfully, it
is hoped. They unintentionally but coercively mould their learners to be the same.
However, in order to benefit all learners and be successful in supporting
them, teachers should provide a teaching environment which contains elements that
can accommodate all learning styles by not forcing or moulding learners to apply a
particular and specific style with which they are not comfortable for a particular task.
The learning environment should support various learning styles that each learner
possesses and wants to bring out to use with a particular task at a particular time.
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3) Learning Strategies
and Mayer (1986: 315) explain that learning strategies are behaviors or thoughts that
a learner engages in during learning that are intended to influence the learner‟s
encoding process. Brown (2000: 122) points out that learning strategies are specific
attacks that learners use when they deal with a given problem. They are the moment-
by-moment techniques utilized by learners in order to solve problems created by
second or foreign language input or output.
Richards and Schmidt (2002: 301) state that in second language learning, a
strategy is usually an intentional or potentially intentional behavior carried out with
the goal of learning. Stern (1992: 261) says that the concept of learning strategies is
dependent on the assumption that learners consciously engage in activities to achieve
certain goals and learning strategies can be regarded as broadly conceived intentional
directions and learning techniques. Wenden (1987: 6) defines learning strategies as
language learning behaviors which learners actually engage in to learn and regulate
the learning of a second language.
Rubin (1987: 6) stresses that learning strategies are strategies which
contribute to the development of the language system which the learner constructs
and affect learning directly. She further defines learning strategies as including any
set of operations, steps, plans, routines used by the learner to facilitate the obtaining,
storage, retrieval and use of information, i.e. what learners do to learn and do to
regulate their learning. (p.19) According to Oxford (2001: 166), learning strategies
are operations employed by the learner to aid the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and
use of information, specific actions taken by the learner to make learning easier,
faster, more enjoyable, more self-directed, more effective, and more transferable to
new situation.
Scarcella and Oxford (1992: 63) mention that language learning strategies are
different from learning styles because they are more specific than learning styles.
They are specific actions, behaviors, steps, or techniques employed by learners to
enhance their own learning. Examples of these techniques are such things as seeking
out conversation partners, or encouraging oneself to have patience to deal with
difficult language learning tasks.
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Rubin is one of the pioneers in the field of learning strategies. Rubin (1987)
divides language learning strategies into four categories: cognitive, metacognitive,
communication, and social strategies. The first two categories contribute directly to a
development of the language system constructed by the learner while the last two are
less directly related to language learning since their focus is on a process of
participating in conversation and exposing themselves to opportunities to practice
their knowledge.
First, cognitive strategies require direct analysis, transformation, or synthesis
of learning materials. They include six main strategies which are clarification or
verification, guessing or inductive inferencing, deductive reasoning, practice,
memorization, and monitoring.
Second, metacognitive strategies are used to oversee, regulate or self-direct
language learning. Planning, prioritizing, setting goals, monitoring, and evaluating
the learning activities are examples of metacognitive strategies.
Third, communication strategies are used by speakers to remain in the
conversation when they face some difficulty due to the fact that their communication
ends exceed their communication means or when they experience misunderstanding
by their interlocutors. Avoiding particular vocabulary items or changing topics are
good examples of these strategies.
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Fourth, social strategies are activities that learners engage in which afford
them opportunities to be exposed to and practice their knowledge. However, as is
mentioned above, these strategies do not lead directly to obtaining, storing,
retrieving, and using of language.
anxiety can reduce learner‟s motivation and badly affect language learning. Diaries
and emotional checklists can be easily used to reveal learners‟ feelings.
Sixth, social strategies facilitate learning with others and help learners better
their understanding of the culture of the language they are learning. Examples of
social strategies are asking questions for clarification or asking for help, and learning
about social or cultural norms of the language being learnt.
According to Stern (1992), there are five major language learning strategies:
management and planning, cognitive, communicative-experiential, interpersonal,
and affective strategies. First, management and planning strategies involve the
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learners‟ intention to direct their own learning. It is believed that if learners are
helped by teachers, they can be in charge of the development of their own program.
However, they must decide what commitment to make to language learning, set
reasonable goals, decide on an appropriate methodology, monitor progress, and
evaluate the achievement based on previously determined goals.
Second, cognitive strategies require direct analysis, transformation, or
synthesis of learning materials. Some examples of cognitive strategies are
clarification, inductive inferencing, deductive inferencing, practice, memorization,
and monitoring.
Third, communicative-experiential strategies are used by learners with the
purpose of avoiding interrupting a flow of communication and keeping the
conversation going. Examples of communicative-experiential strategies are
circumlocution, gesturing, paraphrasing, and asking for repetition or explanation.
Fourth, interpersonal strategies involve techniques used by learners in
monitoring their own development and evaluating their performance. Finding
opportunities to contact and cooperate with native speakers and becoming acquainted
with the target culture are examples of interpersonal strategies.
Fifth, affective strategies include techniques for being conscious of one‟s
emotional situation. Creating associations of positive effects towards the language,
its speakers and learning activities are examples of affective strategies.
4) Strategy Training
identify strategies that good language learners use. The purpose is for teachers to
transfer these strategies to less successful or even unsuccessful language learners. It
is firmly believed that when struggling students are taught these strategies and are
given opportunities to practice them, they can significantly improve their ability to
process information or input, which in turn leads to improvement in language
learning.
Lessard-Clouston (1997) also points out that teachers who train students to
use language learning strategies can positively help them become better language
learners. Teachers should try to help students understand good language learning
strategies and train them to develop and use such language learning strategies.
Incorporating the notion of strategies training can be considered to be a particularly
valuable characteristic of a good language teacher. O‟Malley (1987: 143) explains
that teachers need not feel that their role is limited to simply providing
comprehensible input but include a variety of learning strategies. She further
supports the issue of strategy training as follows:
“Research and theory in second language learning strongly suggest that good
language learners use a variety of strategies to assist them in gaining
command over new language skills. By implication, less competent learners
should be able to improve their skills in second language through training on
strategies….Teachers can play an important role in this training by conveying
strategy applications to students…” (p. 133)
transferability of the strategies to new tasks. A discussion of how to use the strategies
in new settings is conducted to make learners aware of it.
Beckman (2002) proposes a five step model for strategy training. First,
teachers describe a strategy to students. Its purpose, importance, time to use it, and a
procedure for using it are also clarified. Then, teachers model the use of the strategy
by explaining to students how to employ it. Next, teachers provide students with
practice time. They are required to monitor, provide clues, and give feedback to
support learners. The purpose of this practice is to train learners to use the strategy
automatically without having to think. Fourth, teachers promote student self-
monitoring and students evaluate their personal strategy use. Lastly, they are
encouraged to continue using the strategy in new learning contexts.
they are attempting to create homogenous learners). Teachers try to provide solutions
to learners by telling them what strategies to employ at what points. Consequently,
there is no actual set of strategies that should be taught to learners because each of
them is different in dealing with learning. They should be treated as individuals
instead of a homogeneous group.
However, teachers should not try to direct them to function in a certain style
or path. Teachers cannot know exactly what is going on in their students‟ heads. It is
the students ultimately who will decide what to utilize in order to include or exclude
information from their systems. They make decisions as to what they feel is right and
suitable for them. Therefore, individualization is not a luxury but a necessity – a
crucial and necessary aspect of creating a successful language teaching and learning
experience, and an important aspect which all teachers can no longer afford to
ignore.
Instead, teachers should aim to provide the learning conditions and materials
that will enable and foster a variety of learning styles and strategies and thus create
an environment which respects the differences between learners. They should be able
to use whatever works for them. Although there is no real system or method that can
accurately pinpoint these differences, it is generally accepted that each learner
interacts with learning including the listening passages in their own way based upon
the socio-historical background of which they are a product. In addition, activities
should aim at giving learners an opportunity to encounter the language in a variety of
ways and thus make the experience more meaningful to them. Learners should be
given a chance to access the materials in their own personal way and at their own
pace. They should be the ones who are in control of their study progress. They
should have a chance to choose from various supporting resources based on their
own needs.
Further, they should not be forced to progress according to the time schedule
of an alleged „average‟ or homogeneous learner. Teachers should not filter
everything for students. The learners should be in charge of attempting to modify
their own filters. Learners have different strategies and approaches for learning and
will therefore develop their own preferences for how they like to learn and the pace
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at which they learn effectively. As a result, teachers should be sensitive to this issue
because learning will be more effective when learner differences are taken into
account. Learners differ from one another but it does not mean that they are bad or
good. They should be allowed to be successful in learning in their own ways.
Most learners claim to have a lot of difficulty when they have to deal with
normal-speed listening passages. Furthermore, they experience more difficulties
when they have to cope with long listening texts. They consider that the listening text
is far too fast for them to process the information included in the text. Some of them
state that they can comprehend at the very beginning of the text. However, as the
sentences continue to bombard them, they cannot grasp the meaning anymore. As a
result, they tend to panic and their system stops functioning and refuses to process
the rest of the listening texts. They, then, cannot understand the listening texts at all
after a certain point. Cook (1989) claims that the difficulties occurring in listening
comprehension could emerge from the context features, which is processing the load
that learners have to cope with when listening to texts. When this difficulty is
experienced, some teachers eagerly try to help their students to solve the problem by
providing them with slower and shorter texts in order for students to be able to
process and understand the texts. Learners, therefore, normally deal with slow and
inauthentic texts in listening comprehension activities since it is a way of helping
them to understand and cope with listening.
However, this solution, practiced by most teachers, seems to shift the
responsibility away from the students. In fact, the problem encountered might
probably occur from the students‟ internal systems. While listening to a text, learners
have to construct the meaning of the preceding information and retain the
information in their memory while they continue to analyze the continuing flow of
information. Cook (1996: 65) points out that listeners have to remember the
beginning of the sentence or text while they process the middle and the end of the
sentence or text. They have to retrieve the patterns and meanings of words from their
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memory and they have to figure out the relationship of the sentences to its context
from the information in their memory. The students‟ systems, however, might not be
able to process the information instantly. This can significantly affect their ability to
understand the texts. Ridgway (2000: 181) mentions that listening places a far greater
load on the memory as there is no option of going back to previous text in order to
check or revise comprehension.
In Microsoft® Encarta® 2009 Dictionaries, memory span is storage capacity
of short-term memory, i.e. a measure of somebody's memory, often for units of
information such as nonsense syllables or sequences of random numbers, over a short
period of time. Cook (1996) points out that it is impossible to actually process speech
if the learners‟ mind cannot handle enough words. As a result, comprehension will
not occur.
Brown (1995) proposes that cognitive load is one of the most important
determinants of difficulty of listening. Anderson and Lynch (1988) state that a large
amount of information to be processed, combined with a limited amount of time
available for learners to listen to each text, undoubtedly seems to cause difficulty for
listeners. If listeners have to listen to complex texts for only a short and limited time,
they will not have time to make inferences about the texts, or to verify or modify
these inferences. The overwhelming amount of information presented to them could
be problematic to the point of stopping them from listening to the texts. In 1956
American psychologist George Miller reviewed many experiments on memory span
and concluded that people could hold an average of seven items in short-term
memory (Roediger: 2008). When the segments get longer, working memory capacity
will definitely be strained. It can be seen that human cognitive system and memory
system cannot encode or input vast quantities of new information and hold that
information accurately for a long time. There is a severe limit on how much
information can be encoded at a time.
In relation to second or foreign language learning, Call (1985: 769) further
emphasizes that memory span for target language input is shorter than for native
language input. Cook (1996: 66) points out the same evidence of the memory span in
the second language learners. She maintains that memory span is reduced in a second
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language. She further supports this argument by citing Glicksberg (1963) who, in his
tests, found that L2 learners‟ span in English is 6.7 digits, which is lower than that of
native speakers, who score 7.1 digits. Her own research on memory span in 1977
follows a similar trend. Therefore, if listeners are presented with long texts, they will
tend to have difficulty comprehending them or, if they are able to comprehend the
very first section of the texts, their memory span could quickly become overloaded
after the initial section due to the overwhelming amount of information. As a result,
they will not understand the subsequent parts of the text. Rivers (1981: 158) remarks
on this failure:
“The perceptual system has a limited capacity for absorbing information.
Thus, when the perceptual processes are bombarded with items in quick
succession the immediate memory cannot recirculate what it is retaining, and
these items are lost. As a result, the listener loses materials which would have
been useful in interpreting the overall message.”
the structure and speed of the listening texts. This might not be a wise way to assist
learners since they might not be able to function in real life. A better way to deal
with this problem is to provide them with an environment that presents them with an
opportunity to reduce the extraneous cognitive load that they have to deal with each
time. They then can focus better and be able to comprehend the texts. This can be
done through well-designed materials that take this issue into account.
c. Task Features
Anderson and Lynch (1988: 59) point out that teenage first language listeners
report that it is more difficult and problematic to produce a summary of a message
than to recall the complete content although the message is the same. The reason is
that summarizing a message, like distinguishing fact from opinion, is an evaluative
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d. Text Features
Text features are one of the major factors that play an important role in
determining difficulties or ease in listening comprehension. Various researchers have
focused upon the roles of these attributing factors in order to examine the effects that
they have on the listening process. Cook (1989) claims that the difficulties occurring
in listening comprehension could emerge from the text features, for example
information organisation, explicitness, and type of input. If learners are required to
listen to a text which is organized in a very poor pattern, there seems to be no doubt
that they will have difficulties understanding the text as a result. Brown and Yule
(1983) also mention that the speech rate, the number of people involved in the
conversation and the accent the speaker employs can cause difficulties for second or
foreign language listeners.
of colloquial language than most written texts.…The rate of delivery can vary
greatly but learners might perceive it as very fast.…
Richards (1984: 224) mentions that natural spoken texts are often delivered
one clause at a time. They are not in full sentences but in a clause format. Words in
speech are in reduced forms because there is not always time for the tongue to
assume the ideal position which is required to articulate a sound. As a result, it is
very common to find patterns of assimilation, the disappearance of word boundaries,
omission of certain vowels and consonants. The ungrammatical forms and
constructions may be found frequently in speech because the speakers plan and
organize the content of their utterances in concurrent time. Moreover, speech always
consists of pauses, hesitations, false starts and corrections. Between 30 to 50 percent
of speaking time may consist of pauses and hesitations such as „uh‟, „oh‟, „hmm‟,
„ah‟, „well‟, and „I think‟. Cohesive devices used in the spoken texts such as „this‟,
„these‟, and „you are‟ sometimes are not readily identifiable and they may function
differently from the ones presented in the written texts.
What is more, Ur (1984: 4) also asserts that real life listening texts are usually
broken down into smaller units by the physical movement of the speakers.
Furthermore, they are always jerky and contain redundancy in the forms of
repetitions, false starts, re-phrasing and self-correction. Burns, Gollin and Joyce
(1997, p.73) point out the following characteristics of authentic spoken language:
“…the utterances are fragmented and vary in length. They are difficult to set
out as sentences. The interactants use a range of structural choices according
to their need to negotiate meaning and overlap and interrupt one another
rather than take distinct turns. The dialogue is full of hesitations and
backchannelling and the speakers use information and idiomatic language.”
Flowerdew and Miller (1997: 33) are strongly in support of the idea that
commercial texts are very coherent, explicit, self-contained and neatly divided up
into complete sentences:
“Although more recently, attempts have been made to make the language of
academic listening comprehension texts more authentic and „speech-like‟, it
is nevertheless still more often than not the case that, because the listening
texts which are used are scripted, the language found in them retains more
features associated with written than with spoken text and makes them not
typical of authentic lectures.”
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Nunan (1999: 212) also says that non-authentic listening texts usually contain
linguistic features that are usually found in written language. Overlaps, hesitation,
and false starts, and negotiation of meaning can rarely be found in the listening texts.
However, at the same time he seems to support the use of modified texts by stating
that modifications also sometimes have to be made because speakers have used low
frequency vocabulary or unusual grammatical structures that will distract or confuse
the listener.”
Furthermore, listening materials presented in the texts are formed in neat,
simple, rather short, well-formed discrete sentences, rather than in natural sequences
of loosely connected clauses. Fragmentation is generally avoided to reduce
confusion. In the conversation or discussion texts including more than one speaker,
speakers wait patiently for their interlocutors to finish their sentences before they
start to deliver their own sentences. They always talk for approximately the same
amount of time and also in short sentences. The speakers in the listening texts
employ a slow pace and rarely use normal attention signals such as „uhuh‟ or „mm‟.
It is quite normal for materials tend to be biased toward standardized, quasi-literacy
language. As a result, syntax and vocabulary items used tend to be very formal.
Slang and colloquial words or structures are very rare to find. Vocabulary items
incorporated in the texts are very limited, restricted and simplified. A lot of
information is included with the purpose to make the texts clear to listeners. Finally,
disturbing extraneous noise such as background noise, and other people talking is
always reduced or even taken out to help the listeners.
Besides, in a normal classroom situation when teachers pronounce words or
sentences, they tend to pronounce them fairly slowly and clearly. Noblitt (1995: 1)
points out the same direction employed in the procedure of creating teaching
materials:
“…producers of pedagogical materials take care to adhere to studio recording
conditions. Their objective is to eliminate background noise and emphasize
ideal pronunciation to reduce what is considered undesirable variation in
input.”
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This is intentionally done, once again, to make sure that the texts are not too
difficult for the learners to process.
Geddes (1981: 79) claims that an authentic passage of spontaneous speech
seems to burden students with several problems which can lead to panic, anxiety and
fear. Teachers, as a result, need to find texts that will give the learners controlled and
guided experience. Hedge (2000: 255) seems to agree with the idea by giving the
following conclusion: “Perhaps the most vital element in learning to listen effectively
in a second or foreign language is confidence, and confidence comes with practice
and with achieving success from an early stage.” Ur (1984: 27) also supports the idea
of building learners‟ confidence in terms of success in listening comprehension with
the supply of „easy‟ texts and tasks:
“Listening exercises are meant to train not to test; and the best practice is
obtained by having learners do the activity more or less successfully, not by
having them fail. Thought should be given to appropriate grading both of the
language and of the task type so that they are not too difficult. Giving
material that is too easy is, in my experience, much less of a problem; it does
not seem to happen so often, and even when it does, no harm has been done –
the class still gets its (slightly less valuable) listening experience, whereas
exercises that are too hard give little practice and can actually cause harm by
frustrating and demotivating students.”
make input comprehensible, to do for the adult what the „outside world‟ cannot or
will not do.” Long (1983: 138) also identifies the support given to this methodology:
“It is widely assumed, and probably rightly, that samples of a second
language heard but not understood by a would-be acquirer of that language
serve no useful purpose in the second language acquisition process. Only
comprehensible input will do. The question is, how does that input become
comprehensible to the learner? Modifications of the input itself almost certain
help.”
There has been an attempt to support, promote and justify the importance and
advantages of the modifications of input on listening comprehension. It is on the
basis of the theory of comprehensible input going that input language which contains
linguistic items that are slightly beyond the learner‟s present linguistic competence
(Richards and Schmidt, 2002: 99).
Actually, in real life situations, learners will never have an opportunity to
listen to the artificial texts which are slow or free from extraneous noise. The learners
with a pedagogic history of graded and simplified exposure to the language,
therefore, may not have the appropriate skills to understand or recognize the topic or
main idea, nor the details of the passage. So when they have to function in a complex
or complicated environment, as in real life communication, which contains fast,
complex and fuzzy language, they may not be able to interact sufficiently because of
their inability to fully comprehend the language (Ur, 1984: 2). As a result, this
inability to cope may lead to a feeling of disempowerment, leaving them decidedly
unconfident with their level of proficiency.
Ultimately, the purpose of teaching listening comprehension is to enable them
to listen to and understand authentic, complex and normal speed passages in a real
life listening environment. Therefore, listeners should have a chance to be exposed to
natural, complex and unsimplified passages as much as possible rather than
constantly dealing with simplified texts.
It could therefore be argued that the language used in texts must have the
characteristics of natural language use. It should not be slow, simple or free from
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extraneous noise. The speed of realistic spoken language or speech rate is generally
natural, i.e. fast. Realistic spoken language may contain pauses and hesitations,
which are the natural characteristics of authentic language. The learners should be
exposed to this kind of language in order to function effectively in a real situation.
The attention of learners should also be drawn to the tone of voice and intonation
used in the texts since they also contain important information. In fact, artificially
prepared material can sometimes hinder students‟ comprehension since it lacks the
common features contained in natural utterances. Snow and Perkins (1979: 52) seem
to oppose contrived materials by pointing out that:
“Artificially constructed listening comprehension materials especially
„cooked‟ for English as a second language students often reduce the amount
of language redundancy available from a speaker in a natural setting,
therefore, making the listening task unnaturally difficult.”
8. Conclusion
differences in learners. No two students tend to deal with the texts in the same way
because it is clear that each of them possesses a different past history, learning styles
and strategies. They also bring these characteristics with them when they come to
class.
Each of them should be encouraged to make use of their ability in their own
way in order to be successful in learning instead. They should not be forced to follow
the same path and pace to achieve the goal. Different support should be provided to
them in order to assist them. Authentic texts should always be provided to them so
they can deal with things they have to cope with in real life. Their unavoidably
limited cognitive capacity should be taken care of by providing them with different
methods for dealing with the listening texts. The proposed program comprehensively
took all these factors into consideration when its intellectual frameworks were being
developed. With all these factors taken into account, listening comprehension should
become an interesting experience for learners to be involved in and the
should lead to improvement of learners‟ listening comprehension.
B. Text-to-Speech Software
software will be overviewed. Some text-to-speech softwares will be reviewed and the
reasons why one of them is chosen for this project will be argued.
The detailed characteristics of buttons and functions in the program will be
thoroughly presented and described so as to provide the readers with a clear picture
of how they function and what support they provide for learners. The last part in this
section is concerned with Speech Synthesis for English Language Learning,
especially in improving students‟ listening comprehension.
1. CALL in a Nutshell
have fallen behind and need to catch up with the rest of the class, but also for
the better pupils who always finish early and need extra materials to stretch
them. The computer is patient and will tirelessly go over the same points for
as long as is necessary. Finally the computer is consistent, unbiased, and has
no „off days‟”.
Warschauer and Healey (1998: 59) point out some benefits of integrating
computers in language teaching, saying that it provides multimodal practice and
feedback. Individualization in a large class can be easily obtained. It offers fun and
interesting modes of learning. A variety of learning styles is promoted and a variety
of resources is provided.
Based on the references quoted above, it can be inferred that significant
advantages of CALL are as follows:
It offers individualization
It motivates students
Its ability to provide immediate feedback
It increases interaction or the active exchange of information between the
teacher and the students.
At present CALL seems to be a term that can attract tremendous attention
from various parties. Many teachers seem to be eager to apply it in their classrooms
because of its claimed beneficial results in easing the learning process but some
teachers are still reluctant to implement it in the classroom because of several factors
such as the inability to get a grip on the technology or the uncertainty of how to
incorporate it. At first, and even at present in some teaching and learning situations
including some learning environments in Indonesia and in Central Kalimantan
province, teachers were not willing to allow computers into their teaching
environment. This fact is also elaborated by some scholars. To mention a few, it is
Maddux, Johnson and Willis (1997: 4) who state:
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“It would be a mistake for any educational computer advocate to assume that
because computers are a product of technology, they will be universally
welcomed in schools by fellow teachers, school board members, or the
general public.”
Another illustration coming from Higgins and Johns (1984: 10) who describe
the resistance of some teachers to the use of computers in the classroom as follows:
“The usual reaction from language teachers is that they (computer programs)
contain nothing which cannot be done already with pencil and paper, and that
the gain (in individualization or motivation) does not justify the expense and
trouble.”
They further elaborate that: “The computer, some say, serves only the
conscious process of learning, and can do nothing to facilitate acquisition.” (p. 17)
Jones and Fortescue (1987: 99) identify an attitude of several teachers towards an
application of computers in language learning:
“There was early fear that they would replace the teacher, that the teacher
would become superfluous. …many teachers remain worried that the
computer may oust them from the classroom, an opinion which is not shared
by those who have experience of using computers with language learners”.
They also state another interesting aspect of the doubt about their potential,
which results in fear of using CALL programs among teachers:
“Another common barrier to CALL is a fear among teachers of the technical
aspects of computers, which finds voice in the claim that they are „teachers,
not technicians‟. Such feelings are reinforced when demonstrations by
enthusiastic amateurs (and sometimes professionals) go hopelessly wrong:
the program will not load, or „crashes‟ when the user innocently presses the
wrong key”. (p. 100)
These references are now more than one decade old but it seems to be true
that little has changed about the ways some teachers generally conceptualize CALL
and tend to reject it, especially the belief that CALL is not sufficiently human and it
does not represent humanity.
Carballo-Calero (2001: 9) interestingly clarifies the problem of incorporating
technology as follows:
“We are living in the age of computers, and surprisingly enough, language
teachers are, in general reluctant to include them in their classes.
Paradoxically, there are teachers who work with the computer, they do
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research using the Internet, they use the word processor, they consult
encyclopedias on CD-ROM, they communicate with their colleagues through
email…. but they refuse to use these resources in the class…”
The writer herself, in the beginning, was reluctant to use CALL with students.
She believed that it was a field for specialists. Based on her own teaching experience,
she concludes that the skills required to operate the machine are complex. On the
basis that she is required to operate and solve two levels at the same time:
pedagogical level (i.e. what to teach) and technical level (i.e. what goes wrong that
she has to fix), as a teacher who did (and still does) not have technical knowledge of
computers, she felt very reluctant about or to resist using CALL programs in her
classrooms when she could normally cope with and conduct her normal class in a
traditional way.
She perceived the application of CALL as a burden instead of assistance in
making the classroom more interesting and lively. Furthermore, it took time to get
the integration of CALL into her English class well prepared.
Another barrier was the fact that she was still uncertain about the nature of
CALL and how to integrate it into English classes. To sum up, the problems
encountered by the writer certainly occur in other English language teaching learning
environments.
In the writer‟s previous experience, to solve the problems she had to learn a
lot from the scratch. Then she did a lot of trial and error until she got accustomed to
CALL integrated into her English class. Evidently, up to now she still must learn as
the development of CALL is very fast.
Thus, the disadvantages are carefully considered, they can be resolved. If the
content is carefully selected and designed, the material can be implemented for quite
a long time and the issue of time investment in creating the material can be
eliminated. There are also some uncomplicated programs available for teachers if
they want to integrate CALL into their own lessons.
Besides, it can be said that teachers do not actually lose any importance in the
classroom. They, however, play a different role. They just simply shift more
responsibility to learners, which will make the learners more active in creating their
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own meaning and make them more involved in their own learning. This may actually
help them to learn better and become more successful in their learning, which is the
ultimate aim of teaching that all teachers desire.
Well-prepared training can be provided for teachers to demonstrate the
concepts and advantages of CALL and, importantly, how to incorporate it into the
existing curriculum. Consequently, if design and management are carefully done,
CALL can be a very useful tool for teachers because it is self-paced; it is less
threatening and embarrassing when mistakes are made; it provides immediate
feedback; and it is objective because it responds to the student‟s performance rather
than to personal characteristics of students.
An interesting reason that teachers should bear in mind for overcoming the
fear in incorporating technology in the classroom: teachers will not be replaced by
the computer, but ones who are able to utilize the technology effectively and
efficiently in pedagogically relevant ways will definitely have a significant
advantage over those who are not.
Richards and Schmidt (2002: 503) define that speech synthesis is the
automatic synthesis of speech-like sounds by a computer using a speech synthesizer
or voice synthesizer, such as when a computer takes printed text as input and
produces a spoken version of it. In Microsoft® Student 2009, another definition of
speech synthesis is the ability of a computer to produce “spoken” words (“Speech
Synthesis”, 2008). In one of its entries, Microsoft® Encarta® 2009 (2008)
characterizes speech synthesis as computer's imitating of speech, i.e. computer-
generated audio output that resembles human speech. Last but not least, it is defined
as is the artificial reproduction of natural speech (Linguatec Sprachtechnologien
GmbH: 2009).
They are also often referred to as Text To Speech software (TTS). Built in
Microsoft Windows XP, released in 2001 by Microsoft Corporation (Cusumano:
2008), Text-to-speech (TTS) is clarified as the ability of the operating system to play
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back printed text as spoken words according to Help and Support Center Windows
XP.
Based on the definitions above, it can be concluded that speech synthesis is
the conversion of text to speech through special computer applications. Rather than
being played from a previously recorded body of texts, each sentence is individually
generated.
The speech here is produced either by “splicing” prerecorded words together
or, with much more difficulty, by having the computer produce the sounds that make
up spoken words. An internal driver, called a TTS engine, recognizes the text and
using a synthesized voice chosen from several pre-generated voices, speaks the
written text. Many computer operating systems have included speech synthesizers
since the early 1980s. Additional engines are also available through third party
manufacturers. These engines often use a certain jargon or vocabulary; for example,
a vocabulary specializing in medical or legal terminology. They can also use
different voices allowing for regional accents such as British English, or speak a
different language altogether such as German, French or Russian.
Basically designed for the visually impaired people (Kilickaya: 2006) and
introduced first as Texas Instruments Speak and Spell handheld electronic learning
aid in 1978 (“1980: Computers And Electronics,”: 2008), text-to-speech software is
invaluable for blind computer users as it enables them to "read" from the screen.
Thus they can have texts from the Internet or from their computers read to them. It
certainly has other significant applications, for instance: many of the recorded
messages heard on the telephone are also not natural language but are produced by
speech synthesis. This software can be used where no text display or only inadequate
text display is available, for example, for text messages, on the phone or in dialog
systems.
Speech synthesis is also helpful in situations where the eyes are occupied
with other tasks, for example operating a motor vehicle. It is used in automobile
navigation systems, for example. People with speech impediments can use it to
communicate.
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a) Criteria
1. Quality
The first characteristic of synthetic speech which a listener notices is
its quality, that is to say how closely the voice resembles a human one.
After reviewing some TTS applications, the writer comes to a
conclusion that in term of voice quality Linguatec‟s Voice Reader
Studio is the best. The other softwares created unrealistic, robot-
sounding voices, and a difference in terms of intonation and stress. In
other words, it still lacks the complexity of naturally occurring speech,
resulting in 'dead' sound having no emotions.
How can Linguatec‟s Voice Reader be the best in term of its
resembling a human voice? Linguatec Sprachtechnologien GmbH
(2009) claims that the Linguatec‟s Voice Reader is based on detailed
voice recordings by trained speakers, so the voices are not artificial.
This recorded material is then divided into small units. These can be
individual phonemes, e.g. A and E, or diphthongs, such as EA or IE,
and even full syllables. This is important, because depending on the
environment, the same letter can sound different. For example, the
letter E appears twice in the word “sever”, but is pronounced
differently each time. The units are then chained together with very
complex algorithms into a new, flowing audio text. This is the actual
synthesis, or more precisely “composition”. This requires a specific
understanding of text so that the result sounds as natural as possible.
What is easy here is the rule that the voice should rise with a question
mark, and fall with a full stop. However, the program must know
where the subject is in the sentence so that there can be a natural
speech melody (prosody) through the sentence, because this word
carries a strong accent. These analysis processes are considerably more
complex of course – the program has it as tough as any Latin student.
2. Technology
The next aspect to look at is the sorts of technologies employed to try
to achieve the goal. Linguatec‟s Voice Reader Studio has both a male
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As there three ways of using the reading and exporting functions of Voice
Reader, it will also be looked at under the three headings: the Voice Reader
application window, Voice Reader Direct, and Voice Reader plug-ins.
In the Voice Reader application window the users can open a text
document or add text themselves, and then have the text read out or exported to an
audio file. The following topics will show how to open and edit a document, have the
text in the application window read, export text in the application window to an
audio file, and adjust the settings.
Voice Reader supports the following file formats and can open them in the
application window: Text files (*.txt), RTF files (*.rtf), Word files (*.doc), HTML
files (*.htm, *.html).
To open a file, proceed as follows:
1. Click the button at the bottom of the application window, or open
the menu by clicking the button and then select the Open
command.
2. Select the desired format under File type.
3. Select the desired file, and click the Open button.
The users can also add text directly from other applications using the
clipboard. This also transfers the formatting by:
1. Highlighting the desired text.
2. Coping the highlighted text to the clipboard (CTRL+C or Edit – Copy).
3. Clicking in the Voice Reader application window and paste the copied
text by pressing SHIFT + INSERT at the position of the cursor. If the
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text window already contains text that they want to replace with the new
text, then highlight the existing text before inserting the new text.
If the users are making modifications to an open document in the Voice
Reader application window or have inserted text, they can save the text. To do this,
click the button at the bottom of the application window, or open the menu
by clicking the button and then select Save.
The users can either have the entire text in the application window read out
or only a section of it. If they want to have the entire document read, do not
highlight any text. If necessary, click in the text to remove an existing highlighting. If
they want to have only a specific passage read out, they must highlight it. To do this,
hold the mouse button and drag it across the desired text. Alternatively, they can use
the arrow keys with the Shift key pressed.
Before they start playing back, ensure that they have made the required
settings for text highlighting and animation in the Options. These cannot be modified
during speech output.
If they have installed several output languages, they should also ensure
that the appropriate language is selected or the automatic language recognition option
is selected in the Options before starting playback.
To start speech output, click the button. If they want to stop
playback early, click the same button again.
During speech output they can use the three sliders on the right-hand side
of the application window to modify pitch, speech speed and volume during
playback. The changes are not implemented instantly, but only when the next
sentence is read.
In order to adjust the settings of Voice Reader, open the Options dialog
box. To do this, click the button at the bottom of the application window, or
open the menu by clicking the button and then select Options.
All they can choose from the options are: language, speaker, speed, pitch,
volume speech output, menu language, read and highlight text (having the word just
read highlighted (by words) or the entire sentence in question (by sentences)), show
speaker, file format (wav or mp3 format), default path (the folder in which audio
files to be saved when exporting speech output), end of line is also end of sentence,
overwrite existing files without any warning, and add files automatically to iTunes.
Plug-ins are available for the Microsoft Office applications Word, Outlook
and PowerPoint (Version 2000 and higher in each case) and for Adobe Acrobat
version 7.0 and higher. These plug-ins allow Voice Reader to run directly from the
application in question.
Kilickaya (2006) also enlists examples of how this technology can be used.
They are as follows:
1. Creating a list of frequently-mispronounced words.
Language teachers and learners can create a list of frequently-
mispronounced words and save this list as a "wav" for later use. Learners
can listen to these words and repeat while the file is placed.
2. Writing short sentences and listening.
Language learners can short sentences to the extent that their imagination
allows and listen to these dialogues. In this way, this process can be made
enjoyable and fascinating.
3. Creating short dialogues.
Language learners can also write dialogues while changing the speakers of
the programs.
4. Reading and listening newspapers online.
Language learners can also read newspapers online and save them as wav
files for later use.
Similarly, González (2007: 10) applies TTS to enhance Pronunciation in
EFL Contexts, i.e. English for Architecture and Urban Planning students in
Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas, Venezuela. Three ways to apply TTS described
in the article are as follows:
1. To practice the pronunciation of vocabulary the students have failed to
pronounce. After listening to students‟ conversations, oral presentations,
or recordings, a list of the words they have mispronounced is given. Then,
they select the TTS application of their choice, write the words and listen
to their pronunciation. Finally, they record them and post the recordings
to their blogs or wikis where the lecturer can check their work.
2. To listen to written articles from the web. Most of the articles the students
read are on the Web, and it is found they retain more the new vocabulary
if they listen to the texts while they are reading them. Bluegrind has been
of great help for this. Students copy the URL of the site, and they can read
and listen to the article at the same time. Furthermore, they can save the
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recording to post it on their wiki for further listening at home from the
computer or by saving them to their MP3 players.
3. To practice the pronunciation of texts written by them before recording.
Every week the students have to record a text written by them related to
class content. They are asked to write their text, proof-read it, and then
use any of the TTS applications in class to check pronunciation and
intonation before they proceed to record it and post it for correction.
In term of listening comprehension, all a teacher of English as a Foreign
Language can do by applying Voice Reader Studio is described as follows:
1. To develop teaching material from any text in computer (web pages, word
documents, rich texts, e-mails, news articles, online books etc.). Besides,
both the teacher and students can have their own texts (sentences, dialogs,
etc.) read by Voice Reader Studio. Not only listening to any written texts
in computer, the teacher and students can save and export the audio files
into their favorite formats. The files themselves can be handed out
without any difficulties.
2. To develop testing materials from any text in computer (web pages, word
documents, rich texts, e-mails, news articles, online books etc.). To solve
a problem of limited testing material of listening comprehension, Voice
Reader Studio is helpful in creating the material without any problems
such as renting a recording studio, paying high for editing the recording,
etc. Supposed the problems can be solved, the next question will be how
well the spoken testing material resembles a standardized one such as
TOEFL and TOEIC. Voice Reader Studio certainly can answer the
question.
Kilickaya (2006) testifies that in 1995 Natural Voice Reader Enterprise
Edition having AT&T Mike and Crystal American English Voices were
tested and used to create human-sounding versions of a mini dialogue and
a long text from TOEFL Test Preparation Kit published by Educational
Testing Service (ETS). When compared, it was noticed that the resulting
voices were satisfactory in terms of pronunciation and clearness. As the
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C. Rationale
meaning from messages. To do this, learners have to be taught how to use both
bottom-up and top-down processes to understand messages. The language of
utterances – the precise words, syntax, and expressions – used by speakers are
temporary carriers of meaning. Once meaning is identified, there is no further need to
attend to the form of messages unless problems in understanding occurred. Teaching
listening strategies, in turn, can help make learners more effective listeners.
Nowadays the use of computers and technology as pedagogical tools has been
explored to aid in the appropriate instruction of English language learners across all
content areas. Computers could have the potential to play an important role in
language learning including listening comprehension. The emerging importance of
using Computer Aided Language Learning (CALL) is emphasized by Thompson
(2005: 148) insisting that by in future, the only redundant teachers are likely to be
those who are unable to use CALL and other information and communication
technologies in their teaching.
This research, then, proposes that the TTS application, i.e. Voice Reader
Studio can improve listening comprehension, which is an important active skill
requiring learners to operate with both linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge at the
same time in constructing and reconstructing meaning of the listening clips. The use
of the software for improving listening students‟ comprehension is based on
Taxonomy of Listening Skill by paying attention to the factors contributing to
difficulty in the listening process namely Individual Differences, Cognitive Load and
Memory Span, Task Features, and Text Features.
According to Erben, Ban, and Castañeda (2009: 148), through the use of the
software, learners can be provided with an opportunity to listen to extensive English
input. In this way, the use of Voice Reader Studio in language learning can be very
helpful both for the teachers of English as a Foreign Language and their students. By
taking account of learners‟ needs, the teachers can also exploit the reading and
exporting functions of Voice Reader for improving the students‟ listening
comprehension.
To serve the learners‟ needs and provide a lot of exposure to the target
language for students, the teachers can develop listening material from any text in
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computer (web pages, word documents, rich texts, e-mails, news articles, online
books etc.), have them read, save and export the audio files. Another thing to point
out is that the teachers can develop listening comprehension tests from any text in
computer. The self made tests themselves can be tailored to the goal of teaching
listening skill as commonly found that such tests are hard to find and rather
expensive.
Because of the available plug-ins, Voice Reader Studio can be integrated into
computer based teaching media such as presentation software (Microsoft
PowerPoint), portable document format application (Adobe Acrobat), word
processor (Microsoft Word), spread sheet (Microsoft Excel) and web browsers. The
exploitation of Voice Reader Studio can enhance the techniques usually employed in
listening class and substitute the authentic listening materials.
From the preceding discussions, it can be assumed that Text-to-Speech
software can play a great role in improving the students‟ listening comprehension.
D. Action Hypothesis
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
In this chapter, the writer gives details on Research Methodology. She will
begin with setting of the research in terms of time and place of the research. The next
things she considers are the subject of the research, the method of the research,
procedure of the study. The last two parts will be concerned with technique of
collecting data and technique of analyzing data.
This classroom action research is planned to carry out in seven months from
July 2009 to January 2010. The following is the schedule of this proposed action
research:
Table 3.1 Time Schedule
AUGUST
JULY
SEPT
NOV
OCT
DEC
JAN
No. Activities
1 Pre Survey
2 Proposal
3 Literature Review
4 Instrument Development
5 Data Collection & Analysis
6 Report Writing
7 Document Submission
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103
The subject of the research is the tenth graders of SMAN 4 Sampit in the
2009/2010 academic year. They are grouped in X1. There are 35 students (18 female
students and 17 male students). They are chosen because they have not been grouped
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into the Natural Science Class and Social Science Class. In the writer‟s view, by
being heterogeneous the students will give the writer richer perspectives.
Most of the students come from the lower middle socio economic level, a few
from upper middle socio economic level, and the rest is from low socioeconomic
level.
In term of teacher education, Richards and Schmidt (2002: 8) state that action
research is:
“teacher-initiated classroom research that seeks to increase the teacher‟s
understanding of classroom teaching and learning and to bring about
improvements in classroom practices. Action research typically involves small-
scale investigative projects in the teacher‟s own classroom, …”
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They elaborate the definition by enlisting the following cycle of activities: the
teacher (or a group of teachers) selects an aspect of classroom behavior to examine in
more detail (e.g. the teacher‟s use of questions), selects a suitable research technique
(e.g. recording classroom lessons), collects data and analyzes them, develops an
action plan to help bring about a change in classroom, behavior (e.g. to reduce the
frequency of questions that the teacher answers himself or herself), acts to implement
the plan, and observes the effects of the action plan on behavior. (pp. 8 - 9)
The features in the definitions above suggest that a classroom action research is
an action research applied in a classroom setting. It is aimed at improving education
by understanding educational practices and situations.
Three characteristics of an action research by Kemmis and Mc Taggart (1985)
as cited by Nunan (1992: 17) are as follows:
1. It is carried out by practitioners rather than outside researchers.
2. The kind of the action research is collaborative.
3. It is aimed at changing things.
In the same way, Ebbut (1985) as cited by Hopkins (1992: 45) states that action
research is about the systematic study of attempts to improve educational practice by
groups of participants and by means of their own practical actions and by means of
their own reflection upon the effects of those action. According to Mason and
Bramble (1997: 42), it is not confined to a particular methodology paradigm. It may
utilize qualitative or quantitative methodology or a mixture of both. Hall (2005: 187)
adds that mainly AR, qualitative in orientation, can be pursued using the kind of
methods and techniques such as experimental research, protocols, survey research,
case studies, and ethnography.
On account of the discussion above, it can be concluded that the classroom
action research in this study is an educational attempts undertaken by the writer and
her collaborator to improve tenth graders‟ listening comprehension at SMAN 4
Sampit by learning English through Text-to-Speech Software. In the study, the writer
will be both as researcher and teacher. A collaborator would be included in this
research.
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The above model is taken by the writer as the framework in conducting the
classroom action research. The framework is then underlying a part of the
procedures of this study.
The procedures applied in the classroom action research are based on what
Joko Nurkamto (2002: 4 - 5 ) proposes by adapting Natawidjaja (1997).
PR FF SP GP AS-1 O1 R-1 RP …
Note:
PR : Preliminary Reflection GP : General Plan R-1: Reflection one
FF : Fact Finding AS-1: Action Step 1 RP : Revised Plan
SP : Statements of Problems O-1 : Observation one … : AS-2, O2, etc.
2. Fact Finding
In this step, the problems identified are the lack of English listening
materials, a tendency of testing listening comprehension in teaching English
listening skill, the students‟ low listening comprehension. To gain a much
better understanding of the problems above, the techniques to apply are as
follows: test, in-depth observation, document analysis, anecdotal records,
rating scales, questionnaires, and sociometry.
3. Statement of Problems
Based on the identification and the analysis of the problems, the writer
formulates the problems. The formulation of the problems is accompanied
by the causes of the problems in the previous step, so that the writer will be
able to plan an appropriate solution.
The statement of the problem formulated is “Can learning English through
Text-to-Speech software improve the students‟ listening comprehension?”
4. General Plan
After reviewing some literatures on English listening comprehension,
Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) in general, and Text-to-
Speech software, the writer gets familiar with the nature of the problems
and determines the appropriate solution for the problems, e.g. the
integration of Text-to-Speech software in teaching and learning English
listening skill. The writer also takes into account the feasibility of its
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implementation, for example, in that she has been well trained in applying
the software.
According to their importance, the problem which must be solved soon is to
provide the teacher of English as a Foreign Language some listening
materials tailored to the school based curriculum of English without
ignoring the students‟ needs. After the materials are available, by
integrating Text-to-Speech software, the next step is to prepare lessons
plans consisting of teaching steps in the Text-to-Speech software integrated
English listening class. She also prepares teaching aids, teaching materials,
and observation sheets. Besides, she develops tests. The tests are
administered to find out whether there is an improvement in the students‟
English listening comprehension. Thus, the results of the tests reveal how
effective learning English through Text-to-Speech software in improving
the students‟ English listening comprehension is.
5. Action Step 1
In this action phase the writer implements the teaching steps in the lesson
plans. Before conducting the action, the writer bears up in her mind of
anticipating what is going on in the future and adapting/ revising the other
plans.
6. Observation 1
For this purpose the writer applies the techniques used in reconnaissance
step. It is carried out while and after the teaching learning process to catch
the quality of the action. The writer classifies the effects of the action into
two types. The first one is those that can be immediately seen while the
latter is those that can be seen much later.
In this stage, the writer takes the roles as a teacher and a researcher. As the
teacher, she teaches English through Text-to-Speech software.
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As the researcher, she observes the teaching-learning process that runs and
monitors the effects of the action.
During this observation step, the writer is helped by the English teacher of
SMAN 4 Sampit. Afterward, the result of the observation is logged on the
researcher‟s observation sheets as the essential data of the observation.
In order to justify the findings revealed in this stage, the writer takes
photographs and video-records of the teaching-learning process.
7. Reflection 1
Conducted after the teaching and learning process, reflection is for
analyzing what has gone on in the classroom after the action. An evaluation
is drawn to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of the action carried
out. In so doing, the writer is provided with useful information to develop
the next planning.
8. Revised Plan
Lastly, it is time to determine whether the writer stops the research or
moves on to the next cycle based on the result of the reflection phase. In
case she moves to the next cycle, she needs to revise the previous plan after
taking into account the strengths and weaknesses recognized.
1. Observation
2. Content Analysis
3. Interview
4. Questionnaire
Brown (2001: 6) defines that questionnaires are any written instruments that
present respondents with a series of questions or statements to which they are to react
either by writing out their answers or selecting from among existing answers.
Because of their unprecedented efficiency in terms of (a) researcher time, (b)
researcher effort, and (c) financial resources (Dornyei, 2003: 9), the researcher
employs the questionnaire to yield three types of data about the respondent: factual,
behavioral, and attitudinal.
She employs a mixture of two types of questionnaire items, 'Closed-ended'
Questionnaire Items and Open-ended Questions.
5. Test
with prescribed correct answers. Additionally, the test focusing on a specific English
language skill is employed to measure the students‟ English listening comprehension.
Pre test and post test are administered to measure the students‟ listening
comprehension before and after taught using Text-to-Speech software. In so doing,
whether the students‟ listening comprehension is improved or not is recognized.
From the previous part, it can be seen that there are two kinds of data
collected in this study, e.g. qualitative and quantitative data. This section deals with
the techniques applied to analyze each type of data.
1. Qualitative Data
the central category that explains most of variation in the data is revealed or
“discovered,” as Glaser and Strauss put it. The process holds for other kinds
of data, documents, and records as well as the work of other authors.”
It can be concluded that there are some features involved in the analysis of
those data. First, it is an iterative process. The next feature is that researcher engages
in memoing by taking note of personal, conceptual, or theoretical ideas or reflections
that come to mind. Thirdly, it involves some form of coding that reflects both the
personal analytic habits of researchers and the general principles that flow from the
classroom action research methodology and theoretical perspectives. Fourth, in this
study the writer engages in writing up the data as soon as possible in order to arrive
at a more profound analysis of the data. Finally, the writer has a conversation with
the relevant literatures and what is found in the school settings.
2. Quantitative Data
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