Indonesian EFL Journal, Volume 1 (1) January 2015 ISSN 2252-7427 TEACHING CRITICAL LISTENING TO YOUNG LEARNERS IN INDONESIAN EFL CONTEXT Fetty Poerwita Sary Telkom University, Indonesia Email: f.poerwitasary@gmail.com APA citation: Sari, F. P. (2015). Teaching critical listening to young learners in Indonesian EFL context. Indonesian EFL Journal, 1(1), 41-47 Received: 01-02-2014 Accepted: 11-03-2014 Published: 01-01-2015 Abstract: The teaching of English in Indonesia includes four skills—listening, speaking, reading, and writing, and two language components—vocabulary and grammar. Listening is one of the four language skills that have an important role in teaching of English in our country. In the context of early childhood education—including the teaching of English in elementary school—there has been a persistent misconception about how children learn—including learning a foreign language. To ensure success in learning a foreign language, children should have a great deal of exposure to, engagement in, and support for the language they are learning. Therefore, the aims of the study are to know the response of the young learners in learning listening skill through storytelling and whether they can apply the critical listening into the other language skills—speaking, reading, and writing. The subjects in this study are students of level 3 in one of English course in Bandung-Indonesia. Their ages are around 9 -12 years old. The data are gathered from activities in the classroom, observation, and interviews. This reseach provides steps of critical listening activities. The results shows 1) the activities are sucessfully help the students to sharpen their listening skill and 2) most of the students can apply the listening skills to the other skills. In the end of this study, the pedagogical implications were provided. Keywords: critical listening, young learners, Indonesian EFL context. INTRODUCTION The teaching of English in Indonesia includes four skills—listening, speaking, reading, and writing, and two language components—vocabulary and grammar. Listening is one of the four language skills that have an important role in teaching of English in our country. What is listening? According to Howat and Dakin (1974), listening is the ability to identify and understand what others are saying. This involves understanding a speaker’s accent or pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, and grasping the meaning. Call (1985) refers to listening as one of the four skills that plays a very important role at the beginning stage of language acquisition. The basic idea why we teach listening is that it is impossible the people to be able to speak without listening first. As people learning their mother tongue, children listen to other people around them. For example, their mother and father, before they begin to speak. They begin to speak after a period of time called “silent period” (Krashen, 1983). Meanwhile, Barker et al. (1980) as quoted by Bozik (1986) shows that 70 percent of our life waking day communicating; 14 percent of that time is spent writing, 17 percent reading, 16 percent speaking, and 53 percent listening. But actually, until now, listening has attracted the least attention among the four skills. This neglect may come from the fact that listening is considered a passive skill and from the belief that merely exposing students to the spoken language is adequate in developing the skill (Call, 1985). Another reason is that a teaching learning process often gives the impression that teachers are teaching listening when in fact they are teaching other skills, e.g. speaking (Persulessi: 1988). That is why, listening should be taught proportionally and have a place in the teaching of English in our country. In actuality, as we have learned from research, children have their own world, 41