Implementation of Cognitive Strategy in Arabic Listening Class
Raden Ahmad Barnabas, Zainal Rafli, Yumna Rasyid
The Study on Arabic Language Education Study Program at Jakarta State University
Keywords: Arabic, Cognitive, Listening, Strategy
Abstract: Listeners use cognitive strategies to understand elements of the text that have been heard (for example,
summarize) or apply special techniques to work on listening tasks (for example concluding). The aim of study
was to find out the effect of cognitive strategy on Arabic listening learning. The approachto research used
quantitative research. The process of collecting data used documentation, test, and observation. The sample
was taken by 22 students. Data analysis used independent sample t-test. The results showed that the cognitive
strategy has a significant influence on students’ Arabic listening ability. It can be seen from the independent
t-test technique showed that t-Stat (-6,924) < t-table (2.085).
1 INTRODUCTION
Listening is one of the skills and abilities that have an
important role in everyone's life, especially when the
listening process occurs in communication using
foreign languages such as Arabic. Listening plays an
important role in both everyday life and academic
context. This is because listening activities are used
by everyone to achieve success in various kinds of
activities such as the success of education,
understanding of information and world knowledge,
the achievement of ideas, etc. Everyone is
unwittingly, almost part of the time is used for
listening. According to Mendelson (1994, p.9) stated
that some people have used their time to
communicate is different, example they used 40-50 %
to listen; 25-30 % to speak; 11-16 % to read; and
about 9 % to write. Research is from Yıldırım &
Yıldırım (2016) stated that listening skills should not
be ignored in language classrooms and the teacher
must be aware of and must try to overcome and
minimize the problem of listening comprehension
experienced by students. The same opinion arises
from Vandergrift & Goh (2012)stated that listening is
a skill that has an important role, it is because
language learners accept and interact with language
input and facilitate the emergence of other language
skills.
Listening is the most important and easy way to
learn a foreign language. Therefore, listening has
become one of the subjects that must be taken by
students. Often these courses are considered difficult
because the process of Arabic listening is rarely done
by students as part of daily activities. It can be seen
from the learning outcomes that have not met the
standard criteria that have been set. Rost stated that
listening an important position in the language class
because listening activities provide input for students.
Without understanding input correctly, many learning
processes cannot begin. Listening becomes a
fundamental process or the basis of speaking
activities (Richards & Renandya, 2002). Wilson
(2009) says that we learn to listen and listen to the
study. He continued that the main purpose of listening
was to obtain information and pleasure, or for other
reasons such as empathizing, examining, and
criticizing.
The results of the observation and analysis of
document data on the development of Istima 2
learning outcomes in the 2016/2017 year found that
the number who passed this listening course was still
at the percentage of 40%, with the acquisition of 68-
grade average scores. the learning process found the
problem of listening learning namely, (a) students
have difficulty distinguishing different accent of
speakers; (b) students have difficulty understanding
the message conveyed by the speaker; (c) minimal
Arabic listening activities; (d) students have difficulty
determining the conclusions of information heard; (e)
students have not been able to express what has been
heard and relate it to real life; (f) lack concentration
and insufficient vocabulary. These problems are ever
found in Hamouda’s research. The results of the study
showed that accent, pronunciation, speed of speech,
Barnabas, R., Rafli, Z. and Rasyid, Y.
Implementation of Cognitive Strategy in Arabic Listening Class.
DOI: 10.5220/0008999403870391
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Education, Language and Society (ICELS 2019), pages 387-391
ISBN: 978-989-758-405-3
Copyright
c
2020 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
387
insufficient vocabulary, the different accent of
speakers, lack of concentration, anxiety, and bad
quality of recording were the major listening
comprehension problems encountered by EFL Saudi
learners (Hamouda, 2013). Recently, listening has
been described as an interactive and interpretive
process in which listeners use linguistic knowledge
and prior knowledge in understanding messages (El-
dali, 2017).
The findings of the problem are appropriate with
Goh's view. In a study that specifically Goh has
examined students' perceptions of the issue of
listening comprehension, Goh investigated this
problem from a cognitive perspective and identified
three phases of the listening process: perception,
decomposition, and utilization (Goh, 2000). If it
understood more deeply, Arabic is unique and has a
considerable degree of difficulty compared to other
foreign languages such as Arabic. Language structure
and language skills are diverse and have differences
when they say, male or female.
The problem of listening learning is not only from
students, but the use of strategy is one of the
important factors in influencing the success of the
learning process. If the teacher has not maximized it
using the learning strategy, then the readiness of
students to accept the lesson also experiences
obstacles. From the results of interviews, the learning
strategies used so far have not met the needs of
students. The following is a listening teaching step
conducted by lecturers, namely, (1) the lecturer tells
the students about the topics they will discuss; (2) the
lecturer asks what students know about the topics
discussed; (3) the lecturer writes student’s answers;
(4) the lecturer asks students to read the instructions
of listening to get information through a tape
recorder; (5) the lecturers then play tapes and students
listen. Students complete written assignments from
lecturers about the material they are listening to. The
lecturer played back the recording and asked students
to correct their wrong answers. These problems are
difficult because Arabic learning for non-native
speakers is influenced by many factors that should be
able to integrate and harmonize in the learning
process in the classroom (Dajani, Mubaideen, &
Omari, 2014). So Arabic learning requires a clear
methodology in accordance with the context after
creativity during the teaching and learning process
(Dajani, 2015).
The stages of the listening learning process create
many weaknesses that have an impact on the success
of students' understanding of the audio that has been
played. Therefore, in this study offers a strategy to
reduce the weaknesses that have been caused so far,
namely cognitive strategies. Cognitive strategies are
behaviours, techniques, or actions used by students to
facilitate the acquisition of knowledge or skills,
which are directly related to the performance of
certain learning tasks, for example, elaboration,
inference, and translation (Ratebi & Amirian, 2013).
A different view from Buck, the cognitive strategy is
a mental activity related to understanding and storing
information in working memory or long-term
memory so that it can be used again. So, there are
three aspects contained in cognitive strategies, which
are (1) the process of understanding; (2) storage
process that is related to store linguistic and non-
linguistic information in short or long term memory;
and (3) the process of reuse is related to memory
access (Richards, 2008).
In this study, the learning strategy leads to
understanding the contents of the learning material is
direct listening. This means that the strategy used is
not only fully oriented to the strategy. So that this
creates a difference with previous research. Students
are directed to the concept of systematic learning and
self-regulated learning. It has relevance finding from
Mohamed (2012) that as school curricula, nowadays,
encourage independent learning, teachers and
caregivers should be aware to provide children with
appropriate opportunities to use their metacognitive
and self-regulatory abilities in a meaningful way.
Extracurricular activities should also encourage
children's autonomy and ownership of learning. Thus,
this study aims to find a harmonious concept of
cognitive strategies that can build awareness of the
learning process of Arabic listening. Thus, research
focuses how is the effect of cognitive strategy on
Arabic learning?
2 METHODS
This study used a quantitative approach. Quantitative
research problems require that you explain how one
variable affects another. In quantitative research, the
investigator identifies a research problem based on
trends in the field or on the need to explain why
something occurs. Describing a trend means that the
research problem can be answered best by a study in
which the researcher seeks to establish the overall
tendency of responses from individuals and to note
how this tendency varies among people (Creswell,
2012). Sample of research was taken by 22 students.
The process of collecting data used; 1) documentation
was processed to assess the result of learning as one
semester; 2) test gave in the preliminary learning
(pre-test) and the end (post-test), and 3) observation
ICELS 2019 - International Conference on Education, Language, and Society
388
was to observe the learning process in the class. The
validity of the study used credibility, transferability,
dependability, and conformability. The independent
t-test technique was implemented to know the
difference between students’ Arabic listening ability
before and after the application of cognitive strategy.
3 RESULT AND DISUSSION
The test results of students who took using cognitive
learning strategies showed that the highest score
obtained was 90 and the lowest value was 58 with an
average score of 73.59. While the median score
obtained is 70, the mode score obtained 69, variant
obtained 109.97, and standard deviation obtained
7.15. From the results of the calculation, the
following is an explanation of the score of the Arabic
listening ability arranged in the frequency distribution
table as follows
Interval
Limit
Frequency
Low
High
Absolute
Cumulative
58 – 64
57,5
64,5
4
4
65 – 71
64,5
71,5
8
12
72 – 77
71,5
77,5
2
14
78 – 84
77,5
84,5
3
17
85 – 91
84,5
91,5
5
22
From table 1, it is known that there are 54% of
student groups that have scored above the average
score, and 36% of students are below the average.
While the percentage of students in the average score
range is 9%. From the table data presented above, it
is visually illustrated on the histogram chart below.
Graph 1: Frequency Distribution Histogram of Arabic
Listening Score
The result of analysis data used independent t-test
technique showed that t-Stat (-6,924) < t-table
(2.085), which means Ho is rejected and H
1
is
accepted. Besides that, it sees P(T-t) two-tail (9.85) >
t-table (t Critical two-tail) = 2.085. It can conclude
that learning process using the cognitive strategy on
Arabic listening learning has improved. Thus, it can
be concluded that the post-test and pre-test is
significantly different. The cognitive strategy is
effective to use.
Based on the data findings and analysis of the data
presented, it shows that this study has had success in
finding the right concept of learning strategies for the
problems of Arabic listening learning. Cognitive
strategies have directed students to manage
themselves regularly during the learning process in
class. This is because self-management in learning is
also influenced by different learning strategies. Thus,
between students and lecturers become the concept of
unity that must be fostered, so that learning objectives
can be achieved and students have the ability in
accordance with the expertise of the study program
taken.
The problems that have been found in listening
learning that is related to student itself have been
overcome with the use of appropriate learning
strategies, namely cognitive strategies. Broadly
speaking, the findings related to the listening process
are students’ ability to manage and interpret
information that is heard, determine the meaning or
message to be conveyed by speakers, and how to
distinguish sounds from different words. The learning
process uses cognitive strategies have required
students to be able to use information that they
already have in understanding the meaning or
message that they have heard. So, this strategy
requires students to think hard, serious, and have high
thinking patterns. Although, cognitive strategies have
also demanded a continuous learning pattern and self-
regulation in self-regulated learning.
Self-regulation can be associated with the
application of cognitive strategies. As explained in
previous research. Self-regulated learning has built a
lot of interest among academics and psychologists
because research shows that it has a positive effect on
students' academic performance while experts
suggest that "meta-cognitive awareness" influences
one's thinking and can lead to deeper learning and
improved performance, especially among students
who experience problems in learning (Mahadi &
Subramaniam, 2013). The same thing has also been
proven in research (Yusri, Rahimi, Shah, & Wah,
2013). This study investigated cognitive and
metacognitive strategies in Arabic listening learning
among students at Universiti Teknologi MARA
(UiTM), Malaysia. The concept of this strategy
comes from an independent learning framework,
which consists of five components, namely training,
elaboration, organization, critical thinking, and meta-
cognitive strategies. Similar to the study, this study
0
2
4
6
8
10
57,5 64,5 71,5 77,5 84,5 91,5
FREQUENCY
CLASS LIMIT
Distribution of Arabic Listening
Score Range
Y
X
Implementation of Cognitive Strategy in Arabic Listening Class
389
also found the effectiveness of the five components
of independent learning during the experimental
process in the classroom.
In addition, the emphasis on independent learning
and self-regulated learning is based on the
consideration that if students have a thinking pattern,
and the right learning pattern will have a big influence
on achieving learning success. Moreover, both of
these strategies require students to be able to think
critically and learn in a continuous manner. However,
this can be realized when students are also in
accordance with their learning needs. Moreover,
listening learning requires high concentration.
Because students must really listen to audio carefully,
managing the information becomes the right message.
The process of research has been carried out
obstacles during implementation. However,
researchers have overcome these obstacles in
accordance with the problems. This obstacle comes
from the researcher's own self and the external factors
that influence it. Following are the limitations of the
research that has been found:
1. The Arabic listening learning process requires
clear media and audio support and clear sound, so
students can easily listen to the text. However,
when the research took place sometimes the audio
played had problems, so that the sound from the
audio was unclear. This requires audio checking
time which is quite time-consuming. Therefore,
lecturers must prepare audio and material backups
that have harmony with the material being taught.
2. The researcher must carefully select the material
and audio according to the needs of the students
so that the researcher must provide special time in
preparing the learning material.
3. Students who have introverted personality are
very difficult to be invited to discuss or active in
class during the learning process, so researchers
must prepare appropriate stimulation to involve
the student.
4. Research only focuses on one language ability
which is listening. In addition, this study still does
not integrate other language skills consistently.
5. Research is still limited to one college, so the
results of this study are difficult to apply to many
other universities. Unless other universities have
the same problem characteristics as this research.
4 CONCLUSIONS
Based on the results of the analysis, it was concluded
that cognitive strategies had a significant influence on
the development of the Arabic listening ability. It can
be seen from the results of differences in score
obtained by students before and after using cognitive
strategies. In addition, when viewed from the overall
value of each individual it is known that there is a
very good increase. The results of this study provide
several recommendations for consideration in
improving the quality of teaching and learning
processes in Arabic listening learning process.
The first for teachers. The selection of learning
strategies is the main key to achieving successful
learning in the classroom. Therefore, the teacher can
develop cognitive learning strategies in a whole or in
combination. So that the learning process of Arabic
listening becomes easier to understand. Lecturers
must also consider the learning context and school
environment so that the success of teaching and
learning in the classroom can be achieved
comprehensively. In addition, the factors that
originate from the students must be considered and
used as material for analysis.
The second is for students. The results of this
study provide the student to manage the ways of
learning. So that, it can affect the level of Arabic
listening ability. Therefore, students should also be
able to comprehensively understand the objectives of
listening learning and the procedure for using
cognitive learning strategies. So when the teacher
gives a lot of practice, it can be used as a venue for
listening practice. Students can also build
collaboration with colleagues, so they can develop
themselves to become more developed and qualified.
The third is for researchers. This study has several
obstacles during implementation. Therefore, the next
researcher can prepare himself to minimize the
obstacles or problems faced during the research
process. The results of this study can be used as a
guide to developing the application of learning
strategies and personality
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I thank the Ministry of Research, Technology and
Higher Education for providing doctoral program
scholarship assistance. I thank all my students that
have been subjecting of my research and all people
have given their help to me.
REFERENCES
Creswell, J. W. (2012). Educational Research:
Planning, Conducting and Evaluating
ICELS 2019 - International Conference on Education, Language, and Society
390
Quantitative and Qualitative Research. London &
New York: Pearson Education.
Dajani, B. A. S. (2015). Teaching the Arabic
Language: Towards a New Beginning that
Stimulates Creativity. Procedia - Social and
Behavioral Sciences, 192, 758–763.
https://doi.org/10.1016/J.SBSPRO.2015.06.086
Dajani, B. A. S., Mubaideen, S., & Omari, F. M. A.
(2014). Difficulties of Learning Arabic for Non-
native Speakers. Procedia - Social and
Behavioral Sciences, 114, 919–926.
https://doi.org/10.1016/J.SBSPRO.2013.12.808
El-dali, M. (2017). L2 Listening Comprehension: Is it
a Language Problem or Listening Problem?
English Linguistics Research, 6(1), 14.
https://doi.org/10.5430/elr.v6n1p14
Goh, C. C. (2000). A cognitive perspective on
language learners’ listening comprehension
problems. The system, 28(1), 55–75.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0346-251X(99)00060-3
Hamouda, A. (2013). An Investigation of Listening
Comprehension Problems Encountered by Saudi
Students in the EL Listening. International
Journal of Academic Research in Progressive
Education and Development, 2(2), 113–155.
Retrieved from
http://hrmars.com/admin/pics/1882.pdf
Mahadi, R., & Subramaniam, G. (2013). The Role Of
Metacognitive Self Regulated Learning Strategies
In Enhancing Language Performance: A
Theoretical And Empirical Review. Journal of
Asian Scientific Research, 3(6), 570–577.
Retrieved from http://www.aessweb.com/pdf-
files/jasr 3(6)570-577.pdf
Mohamed, A. H. H. (2012). The Relationship
Between Metacognition and Self-regulation in
Young Children. Procedia - Social and
Behavioral Sciences, 69, 477–486.
https://doi.org/10.1016/J.SBSPRO.2012.11.436
Mendelson, D. J. (1994). Learning to listen. USA:
Dominie Press.
Ratebi, Z., & Amirian, Z. (2013). The Use of
Metacognitive Strategies in Listening
Comprehension by Iranian University Students
Majoring in English: a Comparison between High
and Low Proficient Listeners. Journal of Studies
in Education, 3(1), 140.
https://doi.org/10.5296/jse.v3i1.2969
Richards, J. C. (2008). Teaching Listening and
Speaking From Theory to Practice. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Richards, J. C., & Renandya, W. A. (2002).
Methodology in Language Teaching An
Anthology of Current Practice. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Vandergrift, L., & Goh, C. C. M. (2012). Teaching
and Learning Second Language Listening
Metacognition in Action. New York & London:
Routledge.
Wilson, J. (2009). How to Teach Listening. Malaysia:
Pearson.
Yıldırım, S., & Yıldırım, Ö. (2016). Yabanci Dil
Öğreniminde Dinleme Becerisinin Önemi Ve
Yabanci Dil Öğrenenlerin Yaşadiği Dinleme
Anlama Problemleri: Bir Alanyazin
Değerlendirmesi. Abant İzzet Baysal Üniversitesi
Eğitim Fakültesi Dergisi, 16(4). Retrieved from
http://dergipark.gov.tr/aibuefd/issue/28550/3046
14
Yusri, G., Rahimi, N. M., Shah, P. M., & Wah, W. H.
(2013). Cognitive and metacognitive learning
strategies among Arabic language students.
Interactive Learning Environments, 21(3), 290–
300.
https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2011.555840
Implementation of Cognitive Strategy in Arabic Listening Class
391