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.