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BOTTOM-UP AND TOP-DOWN PROCESSES IN LISTENING
Erkinova
Maftuna
Umid
qizi
Student of group 102-23
Teshaboyeva Nafisa Zubaydulla qizi
Scientfic advisor:
Jizzakh branch of National University of Uzbekistan
Named after Mirzo Ulugbek
The faculty of Psychology the department of Foreign language:
Philology and teaching language: English
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14263932
Abstract
: In the modern methodology of English language teaching, top-down and
bottom-up approaches can frequently be heard among language teachers and researchers.
Top-down and Bottom-up approaches: what is the difference? This article presents the
results of investigation on the two approaches of listening. Furthermore, activities that entail
top-down and bottom-up approaches are suggested. Top-down processing refers to the use of
background knowledge to understand the information the listener receives. Bottom-up
approaches happens when the listener analyzes the sounds, words, and/or grammar of the oral
speech they listen to. To improve the listening quality of the learners, the teacher and
researcher needs to have an idea what these two strategies mean and in what situations to use
each one.
Keywords
: top-down, bottom-up, listening, processing, background knowledge,
dictogloss, connected speech, comprehension.
Introduction:
Top-down strategies focus on the “big” picture and general meaning of a
extening text. Often the starting point is to discuss the topic and then to use a “gist” or
“extensive” task to listen for the overall meaning. Top-down strategies rely on students
knowing something about the topic and either knowing how particular exchanges in certain
social situations work (i.e. the functional and situational language common to certain
exchanges) or what “chunks” of language ( expressions , etc)“fit” the particular topic or
situation. Bottom-up strategies , on the other hand, focus on listening for details and involve
tasks that focus on understanding at a sound or word level. Tasks are “intensive”, as they focus
on looking for particular details.
Top-down and Bottom-up processing in listening comprehension.
The strategies
that can help the students to overcome the problem in listening comprehension is to apply the
Top-Down and Bottom-Up processing on classroom learning. Top-down processing in listening
involves the liveliness of building mean based on presumption, conclusion, purpose, and other
revelant knowledge. Bottom-up in listening is more detail in grammar and the meaning of
words. As stated by Gebhard (2000) who divides the information process to two categories are
bottom-up processing and top-down processing. Bottom-up processing refers to the
understanding of the information process by sound analysis, word meaning, or grammar.
Meanwhile, top-down processing refers to the using of schemata or the knowledge to
understand the given information. The schemata relate to the speaker’s daily experience about
the heard topic. In other hand, Helgesen (2003) states that there are five basic principles in
listening learning such as teaching students in two ways of information processing, teaching
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students about kinds of listening, teaching various assigments, consideration of difficulity and
authentic text, teaching various types of listening processing, for examples guessing, drawing
conclusion, monitoring, clarifying, responding and evaluating.
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
recognize 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 recognize 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.
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It’s quite a long way.
Why did you think you’d be able to?
Can you tell him I called?
Learners can be asked to compare their answers in pairs, before listening again to check.
While listening a third time, they could write what they hear, before reconstructing the
complete sentences in pairs or groups. By comparing their version with the correct sentences,
learners will become more aware of the sounds of normal spoken English, and how this is
different from the written or carefully spoken form. This will help them to develop the skill of
recognizing known words and identifying word divisions in fast connected speech.
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.
References:
1.
Teshaboyeva N.(2023) THE MODERN INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGIES IN TEACHING
FOREIGN LANGUAGE.
2.
Anne Anderson and Tony Lynch (1988). Listening. Oxford University Press
3.
Jack Richards, Designing instructional materials for teaching listening comprehension, in
‘The Language Teaching Matrix’, Cambridge, 1990
4.
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.
