The Importance of Understanding Micro-Skill of Listening in Material

Development
A. Background
As well as three other skills, speaking, reading, and writing; listening should
also have a measured and structured test, that is, the tests had specific criteria to
measure the ability of students pretty clear.
Microskills attending to the smaller bits and chunks of language, in more of a
bottom-up process. While macroskills focusing on the larger elements involved in a
top-down approach to a listening task. Microskills is important to used in assesing
listening, but many teachers do not know what is meant by microskill.
B. Discussion
1. English Skills Competence
Competence is the ability to act, think, and act consistently as an embodiment
of knowledge, attitudes, and skill of learners. Someone who learn English, should
proficient knowledge and skills in English, good in implementing English language,
able to develop the logic, ability to think, and analysis.
2. Micro Skills of Listening
Listening has often played second fiddle to its counterpart, speaking. In the
standardized testing industry, a number of separate oral production test are available,
but it is rare to find just a listening test. The reason is, that listening is often implied as
a component of speaking. How could we speak a language without listening? In
addition, the overtly observable nature of speaking renders it more highly than a good
listener. To determine if someone is a proficient user of a language, people
customarily ask, do you speak English?, people rarely ask, do you uderstand and
speak English?. Every teacher of language knows that someones oral production
ability - other than monologues, speeches, reading aloud, and the like - is only as good
as someones listening comprehension ability.
In a typical day, we do measurebly more listening than speaking. Whether in
the workplace, educational, or home contexts, aural comprehension far outstrips oral
production in quantifiable terms of time, number of words, efforts, and attention.

Therefore, we need to pay close attention to listening as a mode of performance for

assesment in the classroom.
3. The Use of Micro Skills in Material Development
The microskill provide 11 different objectives to assess in listening.
1) Discriminate among the distictive sounds of English.
2) Retain chunks of language of different lengths in short-term memory.
3) Recognize English stress patterns, words in stressed and unstressed positions,
rhythmic structure, intonation contours, and their role in signaling information.
4) Recognize reduced forms of words.
5) Distinguish word boundaries, recognize a core of words, and interpret word
order patterns and their significance.
6) Process speech at different rates of delivery.
7) Process speech containing pauses, errors, correction, and other performance
variables.
8) Recognize grammatical word classes (noun, verb, etc.), system (e.g. tense,
agreement, pluralization), patterns, rules, and elliptical forms.
9) Detect sentence constituents and distinguish between major and minor
constituents.
10) Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in different
grammatical forms.
11) Recognize cohesive devices in spoken discourse.
One of the example to assess listening using microskill, I give the student a
recording of narrative story entitled Circus Escape. This is intended for the second
graders of Junior School as found in the lesson plan.
The micro skill or indicator can be entered at the points:
4. Recognize reduced forms of words.
11. Recognize cohesive devices in spoken discourse.

And it can be on the number :

3. Recognize English stress patterns, words in stressed and unstressed positions,
rhythmic structure, intonation contours, and their role in signaling information.
8. Recognize grammatical word classes (noun, verb, etc.), system (e.g. tense,
agreement, pluralization), patterns, rules, and elliptical forms.

10. Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in different grammatical

forms.
C. Conclusion
Teachers should be able to develop indicators in accordance with the microskill learning, means to focus on a more narrow elements in listening assesment.
D. List of reference
Brown, Douglas. 2004. Language Assesment, Principle and Classroom Practices .
USA : Longman.
http://haarrr.wordpress.com/2010/03/28/materi-bahasa-inggris-narrative-texts/