
- Top-down vs. bottom-up listening
- In the classroom
- Top-down listening activities
- Bottom-up listening activities
- Conclusion
Imagine the following situations:
That evening, another friend calls to invite you to a party at her house the following Saturday. As you’ve never been to her house before, she gives you directions. You listen carefully and make notes.
With the holiday anecdote, your main concern was probably understanding the general idea and knowing when some response was expected. In contrast, when listening to the directions to a party, understanding the exact words is likely to be more important – if you want to get there without incident, that is!
In real-life listening, our students will have to use a combination of the two processes, with more emphasis on top-down or bottom-up listening depending on their reasons for listening. However, the two types of listening can also be practised separately, as the skills involved are quite different.
Top-down listening activities
Do you ever get your students to predict the content of a listening activity beforehand, maybe using information about the topic or situation, pictures, or key words? If so, you are already helping them to develop their top-down processing skills, by encouraging them to use their knowledge of the topic to help them understand the content. This is an essential skill given that, in a real-life listening situation, even advanced learners are likely to come across some unknown vocabulary. By using their knowledge of context and co-text, they should either be able to guess the meaning of the unknown word, or understand the general idea without getting distracted by it.
Other examples of common top-down listening activities include putting a series of pictures or sequence of events in order, listening to conversations and identifying where they take place, reading information about a topic then listening to find whether or not the same points are mentioned, or inferring the relationships between the people involved.
Bottom-up listening activities
The emphasis in EFL listening materials in recent years has been on developing top-down listening processes. There are good reasons for this given that learners need to be able to listen effectively even when faced with unfamiliar vocabulary or structures. However, if the learner understands very few words from the incoming signal, even knowledge about the context may not be sufficient for her to understand what is happening, and she can easily get lost. Of course, low-level learners may simply not have enough vocabulary or knowledge of the language yet, but most teachers will be familiar with the situation in which higher-level students fail to recognise known words in the stream of fast connected speech. Bottom-up listening activities can help learners to understand enough linguistic elements of what they hear to then be able to use their top-down skills to fill in the gaps.
The following procedure for developing bottom-up listening skills draws on dictogloss, and is designed to help learners recognise the divisions between words, an important bottom-up listening skill. The teacher reads out a number of sentences, and asks learners to write down how many words there would be in the written form. While the task might sound easy, for learners the weak forms in normal connected speech can make it problematic, so it is very important for the teacher to say the sentences in a very natural way, rather than dictating them word-by-word.
Some suitable sentences are:
- I’m going to the shop.
- Do you want some chocolate?
- Let’s have a party!
- I’d better go soon.
- You shouldn’t have told him.
- What are you doing?
- There isn’t any coffee.
- What have you got?
- He doesn’t like it.
- It’s quite a long way.
- Why did you think you’d be able to?
- Can you tell him I called?
Conclusion
Successful listening depends on the ability to combine these two types of processing. Activities which work on each strategy separately should help students to combine top-down and bottom-up processes to become more effective listeners in real-life situations or longer classroom listenings.
Further reading
Anne Anderson and Tony Lynch (1988). Listening. Oxford University Press
Jack Richards, Designing instructional materials for teaching listening comprehension, in ‘The Language Teaching Matrix’, Cambridge, 1990
Mary Underwood (1989). Teaching Listening. Longman
Penny Ur (1984), Teaching Listening Comprehension, Cambridge.
Magnus Wilson. Discovery Listening – improving perceptual processing. ELT Journal Volume 57/4 (October 2003).
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