Extensive Listening : Design and Its Implementation

Abstract

For many EFL students, developing listening skill is a challenging task especially for those who are not sufficiently exposed to spoken English or lacking access to learning facilities to develop their listening skill. Listening involves not only the micro skill level such as recognizing stress patterns, reduced forms of words, word classes, etc, but also the macro skill level such as recognizing communicative functions of speech, inferences, new information, etc. To acquire both types of skills, EFL students have to practice a lot, get enough exposure and opportunities to listen to spoken English with materials that are interesting and appropriate to their current level. Therefore, the right kind of listening texts appropriate to their levels are needed. To achieve this, an extensive listening course has to be designed to facilitate students to listen to massive amounts of easily comprehensible recorded materials, at their own convenient time, in and/or outside classroom. In such a course, students have the freedom to choose materials that they consider easy and enjoyable within their listening comfort zone. This paper describes an Extensive Listening course offered in the second semester of the 2014-2015 academic year at English Education Program, Satya Wacana Christian University, Salatiga. The course has been designed following a model of curriculum development proposed by Brown (1995) which involves needs analysis, objectives, testing, materials, and teaching. This paper also presents brief description of the course syllabus, sources of materials, students’ journals, their presentations, and comments they wrote about the course.