The listening ability of the fifth semester students of the English Department of Widya Mandala Surabaya Catholic University

From the English Profiency Test which was held by the EESP of WMSCU on 12 August 2006, it is found that the students’ total score of the listening section is lower than that of the reading section, but it is higher than their score in the grammar section. Interested in this matter, the writer tried to find out whether the skills of listening that are taught in the classroom by the listening lectures now are enough to make the students comprehend listening or needed to be improved by adding some others skill that the students really need to comprehend listening. The study under report is a documentary analysis. The subjects are the Academic Year 2005 students of EESP of WMSCU. The writer used the students’ scores along with the test items as her data. She used descriptive statistic in scoring the subjects and then she graded the subjects based on their scores. Next, she classified the test items into 8 sub-skills, and analyzed the test items. The findings from the students’ scores analysis show that only 13 (25%) students got grades A, B+, B, C+, and C, whereas 39 (75%) students got grades D and E. It can be concluded that as a grasp the students’ listening ability is poor. Next, the findings of the listening sub-skills analysis reveal that the listening subskill mastered the most by the test takers is understanding the expressions of agreement (74%) whereas the listening sub-skill mastered the least is understanding the who or what is doing the action in a passive sentence (27%). Between these two extremes, the listening sub-skills dealing with understanding the who the speaker is, where and when something happened is mastered by 54% of the test takers; topic or the main idea of the conversation is mastered by 52% of the test takers; finding details based on the order of the conversation is mastered by 51% of the test takers; restatement is mastered 49% of the test takers; the expressions of suggestion is mastered by 8%; negative statement is mastered by 29% of the test takers. From the findings above, it can be concluded that the test takers master the macro skills better than the micro skills. The reason is macro skills are skills that only use our prior knowledge to predict something. Those skills are easier than micro skills that make the listeners to receive, process, and interpret the sounds. The study under report focused only on the 8 listening sub-skills that have been taught to the subjects. The writer hopes future researches will investigate all of the listening sub-skills more deeply. Future researches will also be conducted with more extensive research techniques. The writer also suggests that the listening teachers have to teach listening from specific skills (micro skills) to general skills (macro skills) in order to make the students able to make the transition from applying only bottom-up processing to including both bottom-up and top-down processing in getting the point of an oral text