Teaching listening skill through short dialogues to the first year SLTP students

Among the four language skills, namely: listening, speaking, reading and writing, listening is the important one to consider eventhough listening is the most neglected skill among them and regarded as receptive and passive skll. The reason why listening should be the one to consider is because listening is essential in communication since people primarily communicate by hearing someone speak to them, then they will give responses to what they have heard. Therefore, a person should not stop increasing his listening skill if he wants to improve his communication with other people. As a part of language mastery, listening improvement is important in foreign language learning and teaching. Students who have accustomed to listen to the spoken English will be easy to comprehend the lesson presented by the teacher orally. That is one of the important reasons why the teacher should teach their students listening skill for the mastery of English as a foreign language which has been widely accepted that English is considered as an international language. Dialogues seems to be good materials to improve the students’ listening skill because of some reasons. Firstly, dialogues are meaningfully contextual language material and represent real communication; secondly, dialogues have social context: thirdly, with dialogues, the students can practice to pronounce the correct intonation, stresses and rhythm at the same time by repeating the dialogues line by line to the complete ones after the audio-tape played. To be successful in the listening class, the teacher should concentrate on selecting the materials, because not all the dialogues are suitable for the students, especially the first year students of junior high school. The next concern of the teacher is how to conduct the listening class. In this case, the writer uses three strategies of teaching listening. They are: pre-listening activity: the activity before the students listen; whilst-listening activity : the activity while the students listen and post-listening activity, the activity after the students listen. Finally, the writer hopes that this thesis may contribute some ideas to the English teacher and the English teacher candidates, especially in their efforts of developing and encouraging the students’ listening skill