The Relationship between Extensive Reading and Listening Skill

WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EXTENSIVE READING AND LISTENING SKILL??

                Listening is one of the skills in English which is really important to be developed in order to success in mastering English. In this time, I would like to talk about the relationship between extensive reading and listening skill. People said that listening skill might be the skill that got the least influence from extensive reading. Why does it happen? Because listening and reading skills are very different skills. But in my opinion, extensive reading do have impact for listening skills. Actually, extensive reading cannot influence our listening skills immediately. It can be happen but it will requires gradual steps and the effect will not immediately gotten by the readers. The first is, doing extensive reading regularly and understand it well can improve your vocabularies. If you already read many kinds of books and then have many vocabularies in your memory, you will be able to listen and recognize many words in listening tracks. Recognizing words and understand it’s meaning are very important in listening skill. You can’t be a good listener if you difficult to recognize the words in listening tracks. Slow but sure, it will lead to your fluency of listening skills.

                But, in order to be good at listening, we have to use our vocabulary memories that we have into the listening activity itself. Practice our listening skills and we will see that the vocabularies knowledge that we got by doing extensive reading will give a significant change in our listening skills. Example, we can try to listen to story-telling audio and see what kind of improvement we got in listening skill. We will be smoothly doing the listening activity because we have many vocabularies in our memories.

                Also, if we have already done extensive reading, we will get many knowledge about structure of the text. If we have good comprehension of text structure, it will help us elevated in listening skill. Why? Because if we know the text structures, it will makes us know the structure of listening tracks that we listen through our ears, and estimating what kind of listening tracks we heard.

                Beside that, the more we read many kinds of books, the more we got many different kinds of knowledge. Example, if we often read books about football, then we will develop our knowledge about football. Then, if we listen to listening tracks that talking about football, we will recognize the words and difficult terms that used in football. We will be easier to connect the words because we know what it talking about. But, the people who didn’t have enough knowledge about football will be confused on difficult terms which they listen, even they’re good at listening in general. People who lack of it will hard to assume the words they listened, and it will give some effects to next words they will listen.      

 

Eventhough extensive reading didn’t give direct and immediate effects to improving listening skills, but extensive reading; in this case in foreign language; is still a beneficial activity that will make us be better in terms of our knowledge and comprehension towards foreign language. Both extensive reading and listening are skills which very important in mastering a foreign language. Doing extensive reading will leads to good improvement to the other skills in foreign language such as writing, grammar, vocabularies, and so on. Even extensive reading didn’t directly give improvement in listening skill, if we do extensive reading delightfully then as time goes by it will give positive effects to not only for the others skills, but also for listening skills.           

Poem Analysis : The Eagle by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Well, this one was my task in Poetry subject at my college ^^

The Eagle

 "The Eagle" was first published in 1851, around the time Tennyson was on his way to becoming the most famous British poet of his age. The poem is considered a perfect combination of sound and meaning.

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson

    He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

    Close to the sun in lonely lands,

    Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

    The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

    He watches from his mountain walls,

    And like a thunderbolt he falls.

1.      Read the poem once quickly, three times slowly, aloud

2.      Write down the images, similes, metaphors which you find in the poem. Comment on each of them

3.      Read the poem again and figure out its meaning

Answer

The images :

-          The image that we can see are : Crags, lands,  sun, sea, mountain, and thunderbolt

-          Lonely land : means a land that really quit and it’s might be  no human in it

-          Azure world : azure means blue, so it means the earth that surrounded by blue skies

-          Crooked hands : The eagle has no “hand” but his foot can grab something like the hands, so the poet use “crooked hands” to illustrate the eagle’s foot

-          Mountain walls : The word “walls” here means the part of a mountain, but not the wall in literal way

-          Like a thunderbolt he falls : means the move of the eagle is really fast

The similes :

-          “And like a thunderbolt he falls” means the eagle move down really fast which the poet illustrated it’s as fast as thunderbolt

The metaphors :

-          “The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls” means the word “wrinkled” is usually used for human or animal’s skin, so using the word “wrinkled” for sea means that the sea is waving and the poet express that with the word “wrinkled”.  For the word “crawls”, the poet  want to express that the sea is moving slowly and he illustrate it with the word “crawl” which usually used for living things

-          “He clasps the crag with the crooked hands” means the eagle clasps the rocky area of a place with his foot, which the poet illustrated is as “crooked hands (tangannya yang bengkok)”. The eagle didn’t have the hands but the poet illustrate that the foot of the eagle is “the hand” that clasp the rocks.

The meaning of the poem :

The meaning of this poem is about the life of eagle in literal meaning or means exactly of what they say. The first line on the first stanza means the eagle stands and clasps the rocks with his foot. The situation is on a sunny day and the sky was blue. Then at the first line of second stanza, means that the sea is waving and moving slowly, and the eagle was near of it. I think the meaning is the eagle was watching carefully to catch a fish on the sea. He stands at the mountain and watch it. Then, when the fish came, he fly down to the sea really fast, which the poet illustrated it like a thunderbolt

example of background of the study

maybe you need example to make a background of the study (of a thesis). Here's the simple example !

A STUDY OF LEARNING STYLES OF ENGLISH STUDY PROGRAM STUDENTS

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

A.    Background of the Study

            Learning is a complex process where student’s motivation, teacher, learning materials and several other aspects interact with each other. Learning is an activity where we try to understand and gained information which are beneficial for us, and we can process it to further use. According to   

            In learning process, people differ from each other in the way they prefer to learn. Some people like to read things and seeing illustrations, while the others want to listen or doing  physical  movements. People differ from each other in the way they learn because they have individual way of making themselves understand and learn the lessons. That’s what we called learning styles. Learning styles means some approaches that the learners can use to learn something. This is crucial because each person have their own characteristic, so they need different learning styles that fit them. Once they found language learning styles that they enjoyed, they will more enthusiastic to learn.

           

            Learning styles are very crucial because that’s the way people will learn something. It is also important that people should have known their own learning styles that fit them. If they found and aware with their own learning styles, it is really good for making them learns better.  The better one is aware of his own learning style, the better he can use them to his advantage in learning. (Verkkotutor 2005).

             There are many types of learning styles. There are analytic, global, sensory preferences, intuitive, sensory learning, and orientation to closure. Analytic types tends to concentrate on grammatical details and often avoid more communicative activities. In contrast, global type tends to do and liking more communicative way that involved full-speaking activities rather than concentrate on grammatical details.