Mastering the Art of Active Listening: Effective Strategies for

Teaching Listening Skills

Muhammad Farhan Arifianto

INTRODUCTION
Listening is a receptive use of language and is the first receptive skill to develop
in humans which focuses more on meaning than on language. Sarıçoban (1999)
states that listening is the ability to identify and understand what others are
saying. Some experts say that listening is the ability to identify and understand
what other people say so that communication between individuals can be
established. The ability to listen is very important especially in terms of
teaching language because with this ability students can understand well how a
word is spoken and what the speaker means by speaking so that students can
later practice it in the real world.
Listening skills is very important and plays a vital role in the language teaching
process. However, in its application there are various factors that make this
ability very difficult to learn. According to Yagang (1994) [2], the problems in
listening were accompanied with the four following factors: the message, the
speaker, the listener and the physical setting. Some of these factors include the
inability of students to understand the language spoken, the pronunciation of the
language by speakers who are not clear, the lack of vocabulary which causes
students to be unable to understand clearly when the speaker pronounces the
sentences and so on. It is these difficulties that hinder the listening ability from
developing in students so that educators must pay more attention to this in the
process of teaching the language. Educators must know in advance the factors
or what causes listening skills to be difficult for students to master, then from
there it can be seen which strategies is suitable to be used.
In several studies, there are several strategies that are suitable for developing
listening skills for students. The strategies used can vary depending on the
conditions and situations as well as the factors that influence the process of
teaching listening skills. This article aims to explore more deeply what are the
effective strategies or methods used to teach listening skills to students.