A DESCRIPTIVE STUDY ON LISTENING COMPREHENSION DIFFICULTIES OF THE SECOND YEAR STUDENTS OF MAN I JEMBER IN THE 1999 / 2000 ACADEMIC YEAR

Abstract

The skill of listening comprehension is essential part of communication and as a basis to language learning. Yet, it seems hard to make the students as a fluent listener. They still have some difficulties in interpreting and comprehending the message from the sender given or even never catch any single word spoken. There are three important components in listening comprehension, namely vocabulary, structure and phonetic. Concerning with the reasons above, it is interesting to conduct research in listening comprehension topic. Therefore, the general research problem was formulated as follows: How far is the difficulties of listening comprehension of the second year students of MAN I Jember in the 1999 / 2001 Academic Year ? While the specific problems were: 1) How far is the vocabulary difficulties in listening comprehension of the second year students of MAN I Jember in the 1999 / 2000 Academic Year ? 2) How far is the structure difficulties in listening comprehension of the second year students of MAN I Jember in the 1999 / 2000 Academic Year ? 3) Bow far is the phonetic difficulties in listening comprehension of the second year students of MAN I Jember in the 1999 / 2000 Academic Year ? The research respondents were the recond year students of MAN I Jember in the 1999 / 2000 Academic Year and proportional random sampling was used to get the sample. In addition, data collecting methods applied were test, interview, and documentation. The collected data were analyzed by using percentage. The research results showed that the difficulties faced by the second year students of MAN I Jember in the 1999 / 2000 Academic Year was 41,26 % or in the difficult category. The detail findings were 28,16 % or easy for vocabulary, 42,16 % or difficult for structure and 53,16 % or difficult for phonetic comprehension. Based on the research result, it is suggested that the English teacher give more portions of exercises in listening comprehension especially in learning phonetic.