The reading material provided in the activity explains what listening skills are, including various

factors affecting the quality of a listening text, listening material for language classrooms,
listening sources, macro, and micro-listening skills, listening sub-skills, approaches to listening,
as well as stages and current trends in teaching listening skills.

Upon reading the material, I was able to capture that listening is not passive but an active and
interactional process in which the listener plays a very active part, the one that receives,
understands, constructs, and responds to the intended message of the spoken and/or
non-verbal message, so there is a process of understanding the message of the first speaker. It
indicates that the listener should digest the message of the speaker carefully to get the
information from the speaker, which is considered to be an essential skill because, without it,
any learning cannot begin or be produced.

I also learned that listening is a different process from hearing because hearing is a passive and
natural process, whereas, as I mentioned a while ago, listening is an active process and is
defined as a skill.

The two factors that affect the quality of a listening text can be divided into two categories which
are content and delivery. In terms of content, we should keep in mind that the listening text
must captivate the learners' interest, making it essential for us to know who and what our
learners are. Additionally, the more complex the grammar in the text, the more difficult it will be
for each learner. As for the delivery, we have to consider the length, quality of material, and
method that we are going to use.

In selecting the right listening materials for language classrooms, there are two types: authentic
and non-authentic listening materials. When we refer to authentic listening materials, we
mean written or spoken texts, which are commonly not intended for language teaching. They
present the real listening situation in the language. While non-authentic listening materials that
have been specifically designed to aid the teaching process, such as textbooks and recorded
texts.

There are several sources that can be used in a language classroom, and these are [read]

Next are the macro- and micro-listening skills, wherein the macro-skills isolate those skills
that relate to the discourse level of organization, while those that remain at the sentence level
continue to be called micro-skills. Microskills are concerned with comprehending the speaker's
utterance.

These are the most commonly used listening sub-skills in language classrooms that help
listeners understand the listening text.

The two approaches to listening are bottom-up and top-down. Top-down processing refers to
the use of schema or the knowledge of learners to understand the information received, while
bottom-up processing refers to the process of understanding the information through the
analysis of sound, sense of the word, and grammar.
And next are the stages of teaching listening skills, in which listening may be divided into
three stages: pre-listening, while-listening, and post-listening, and each of the three stages has
its own specific purpose.

Pre-listening activities assist in hearing and providing some clues about activity expectations,
primarily by activating schema.

While listening activities are clearly linked to the listening text, and students do the activity
either while they are listening or just after.

Post-listening activities take longer time than the other activities because students deal with
thinking, discussing, and reflecting and writing processes.

The last one is all about the current trends in teaching listening skills. These are the following:
[read]