This writing is a critical review of a chapter from a book entitled Interventions in Learning Disabilities: A

Handbook on Systematic Training Programs for Individuals with Learning Disabilities (pp.159-173) “What is
Listening Comprehension and What Does It Take to Improve Listening Comprehension?” written by
Young Suk Kim (University of California) and Heather Pilcher, June 2016.

This chapter talks about what is listening comprehension, and what does it take to improve
listening comprehension. The writer defines the listening comprehension as one’s ability to perceive the
meaning of any form of spoken language (stories, conversations, etc). Moreover the writer also talks
about how the listening comprehension is actually a high order language skill because it needs more
vocabulary.

The writer states that oral language skill is very important because the improvement of writing
and reading skill, and implies that the teachers and parents should pay more attention to the child’s
listening skill. In addition to that, the writer says that the writing skill and listening comprehension is
actually not too related but a good listening comprehension can facilitate the student to produce a good
writing idea and organization.

The writer states that listening comprehension is not a skill that a child can acquire, but even if
the listening comprehension of every kid is different, the skill is still improvable. So, according to the
writer, the reading and writing instructions should be in listening form to help train the students on their
listening comprehension.

The writer put some examples in the chapter that is very good for the reader to understand
what she is going to say. Sadly, the language style used in the chapter is far too “academic” or too
formal. There will be some people getting confused when reading this for the first time.

I have the same opinion with the writer in her opinion that reading and writing instruction
should be in listening form, so that the students at a very limited time will practice their listening skill.
When they are able to do as what the instruction says, then they understand. But, at the same time, this
will be very hard to practice in countries like Indonesia, where English is not second language, but
foreign language. From the observation, most of the students here are having hard time understanding
spoken language. So, if the teacher decides to use the technique suggested by the writer, the learning
process will be very useful or otherwise it will just waste of time.

In conclusion, the writer’s idea for fusing listening with reading and writing is a good idea, but
the teacher’s who are trying to adapt this technique to their class should consider the ability of their
students so that the learning will be meaningful and useful to both the students and the teacher.
This writing is a critical review of a journal article entitled “Listening Comprehension Ability and
Language Attitudes: American vs. British English” by Fei-Hsuan Liao (Chienkuo Technology University,
Taiwan, R.O.C.) and Rou-Jui Sophia Hu (Cheng Shiu University, Taiwan, R.O.C.), Published by David
Publishing as part of Sino-US English Teaching Journal, September 2016, Vol 13, No. 9, 671-680.

English has become the International Language. Many people around the world are able to
speak English. American English is the most popular English accent, and even taught to most schools
around the world. During World War II, America is the most culturally and economically influential
country, that is why up to this day, many people are more familiar with American English.

A study done in Sweden showed an interesting fact. In Sweden, English is taught in British style.
As we know, there are slight difference between American and British English pronunciation, and there
are some words that are different. When the students are tested to find their preference between these
two accents, the result shows that there are some students have more preference to American English
than British English. This is an interesting fact is the student who have American style preference is
affected by the mass media which is filled more with American English.

Moreover, communication can be acquired when the language learners have the ability to
understand English from many accents not only American.

In line with the opinion of the writer, I think English learners should familiarize themselves with
many English accents not only American. Many countries in Asia also use English in their own way. It is
better if the writer consider writing the same comparison between American style English with some
English style from Asia, for example Japan English, or Korean English.

Despite that, the writing of this paper is very simple but weighted. The text can be easily
understood because the writer is using “easier” words than other article journal.
This writing is a critical review of a journal article entitled “Learner’s Listening Comprehension Difficulties
In English Language Learning: A Literature Review” written by Abbas Pourhosein Gilakjani (Lahijan
Branch, Islamic Azad University, Lahijan, Iran) and Narjes Banou Sabouri (Department of Linguistics,
Payame Noor University, Tehran, Iran) which published by Canadian Center of Science and Education a a
part of English Language Teaching; Vol. 9, No. 6; May 2016

Listening is the process of perceiving the meaning of spoken language at native speaker normal speed.
While Listening Comprehension is understanding and making sense of spoken language by knowing the
speech sounds, understanding the meaning of each words, and eve understanding the syntax of
sentences.

There are three listening comprehension strategies provided in this journal, such as Cognitive Strategies
which related to understanding and gathering input in short term memory or long term memory for
later use. This strategy is divided by two; top-bottom and bottom up cognitive strategies. The second
strategy is Metacognitive Strategies which allows the learners to manage their learning trough planning,
checking, assessing, and changing. And the last one is Socio-affective Strategies where the learners
corporate with others to check their comprehension, and reduce their apprehension.

The major problems faced by listeners are Quality of Recorded Materials, Cultural Differences, Accent,
Unfamiliar Vocabulary, Length and Speed of Listening. In order to overcome these problems, the writer
suggest some things to do such as; listening should meet the students’ needs, teacher should design
listening material that encourage students to improve their listening skill, teacher should familiarize the
students with the rules of pronunciation, and so on.

As a literature review, this journal article provides very useful information for the teachers in designing
their listening material. Though, the suggestion provided is barely on the writers’ opinion which is surely
based on the situation around him. That is the reason why some of these suggestion might not be
applicable in other countries for example “Teacher should ask their learners to always listen to music,
documentaries, and news on the radio and television, talk to native speaker face to face on the internet
so they can create and reinforce a good habit of listening in themselves.” This suggestion might be
applicable to students in big cities, for they have unlimited access to the internet. But, for students in
villages, they will have a difficulties to so, because the TV cannot provide what they need. The news
mostly is in Indonesian, also the songs.

After all, the suggestions are very useful for the teachers, but if the condition is not supporting, then it
have to go back to the creativity of the teacher to provide the best for his/her students to learn.
This writing is a critical review of a journal article entitled “The Importance of Listening Comprehension
in Language Learning” by Sayedeh Masoumeh Ahmadi (University of Gulian, Rahst, Iran) Published by
www.ijreeonline.com as part of International Journal of Research in English Education Vol. 1, No. 1;
November 2016.

The learner should learn to understand the spoken language before they are able to speak. If they want
to have a transactional communication with native speaker, they should first understand and
comprehend what the native speakers are telling. Listening consist in auditory discrimination, aural
grammar, choosing necessary information, remembering it, and connecting it to the process between
sound and form of meaning, moreover listening is mental ability that helps us understand and an
important part of successful communication. While, listening comprehension is a different process of
understanding. Listening comprehension means not only understanding the meaning of the speech but
also the syntax of each sentence.

The components of listening comprehension are; the ability to recognize sounds, intonations, and voice
qualities, the ability to understand the whole speech of the speaker, the ability to save the message in
the memory until it can be processed. Comprehension is the speech reception at the syntactic, lexical,
pragmatic, and discourse level.

The teacher in listening class will play a role as an organizer, controller, evaluator, resource, tutor, and
prompter. In teaching listening comprehension, the teacher should consider that listening
comprehension class is not to test the students but to teach them. The class should be communicative
so that the students will be able to explore themselves.

The writing of this article is very simple that the reader will easily understand what the writer is going to
say. Though, it is better if the writer do a mini research on what the general principles in teaching
listening comprehension so that the readers will get an actual result not only based on theory.
This writing is a critical review of a chapter from a book entitled “Assessing Listening – An overview of
listening comprehension” written by Gary Buck published by Cambridge University Press.

Listening comprehension is a complex process and to measure it, we have to understand how the
process works.

Knowledge used in listening is top-down and bottom-up knowledge. Where bottom-up is where the
listener interprets the literal meaning of the sentence as what he/she thinks the speaker means. They
process the language in a certain process from the lowest stage to the higher ones in an order. While
top-down is the contrary. The listener will understand what the speaker means even with little speech
by configuring the speech with another things around such as the body language or the speaker’s mood.

The listeners listen to spoken language which encoded in form of sound, linear and takes place in real
time, and linguistically different from written language.

The Acoustic input that is received by the listener has some elements such as Phonological modification,
stress and intonation, redundancy and shared knowledge. These elements affect the meaning
interpretation of the listeners.

Real time nature of spoken language is a challenge for listener for what we hear this moment cannot be
rewind unless you ask the speaker to say it again. In this occasion, the listener should have an automatic
processing which demands the listener to understand the speaker’s each word automatically. Real time
speaking can also resulted in a interpretation vary, where the listener might just get the wrong meaning
because of noise, distraction, or thinking something else. Different listeners have different motives in
listening so that sometimes they will only pay attention to what they think is interesting.

Lastly, there are some differences between spoken text and written text. The spoken text is freer than
written text. The grammar of the spoken text might just not complete because people usually do not
talk in full sentence. In spoken text there are two discourses. The first one is planned discourse where
the speaker will just spontaneously speak while planned discourse is a result of a worked text. This also
affects the grammar in each discourse. The planned one will have more perfect grammar than the
unplanned one. It is also led to the difference between the spoken language and written language.

This chapter consist much useful information to the readers, but somehow at some points it is not clear
enough. It is better if the writer gives clearer example in every point so that the reader will know what
the writer really means.