In this post on teaching listening, Interchange author Jack C. Richards continues to analyse bottom-up processing: using the incoming input as the basis for understanding the message.
Teaching bottom-up processing
Learners need a large vocabulary and a good working knowledge of sentence structure to process texts bottom-up. Exercises that develop bottom-up processing help the learner to do such things as the following:
- Retain input while it is being processed
- Recognize word and clause divisions
- Recognize key words
- Recognize key transitions in a discourse
- Recognize grammatical relationships between key elements in sentences
- Use stress and intonation to identify word and sentence functions
Many traditional classroom listening activities focus primarily on bottom-up processing, with exercises such as dictation, cloze listening, the use of multiple-choice questions after a text, and similar activities that require close and detailed recognition, and processing of the input. They assume that everything the listener needs to understand is contained in the input.
In the classroom, examples of the kinds of tasks that develop bottom-up listening skills require listeners to do the following kinds of things:
- Identify the referents of pronouns in an utterance
- Recognize the time reference of an utterance
- Distinguish between positive and negative statements
- Recognize the order in which words occurred in an utterance
- Identify sequence markers
- Identify key words that occurred in a spoken text
- Identify which modal verbs occurred in a spoken text
Here are some examples of listening tasks that develop bottom-up processing
Example
Students listen to positive and negative statements and choose an appropriate form of agreement.
Students hear Students choose the correct response
That’s a nice camera. Yes / No
That’s not a very good one. Yes / No
This coffee isn’t hot. Yes / No
This meal is really tasty. Yes / No
Example
The following exercise practices listening for word stress as a marker of the information focus of a sentence. Students listen to questions that have two possible information focuses and use stress to identify the appropriate focus. (Words in italic are stressed.)
Students check Students hear information focus
The bank’s downtown branch closed today. Where / When
Is the city office open on Sunday? Where / When
I’m going to the museum today. Where / When
Example
The following activity helps students develop the ability to identify key words.
Students hear
My hometown is a nice place to visit because it is close to a beach, and there are lots of interesting walks you can do in the surrounding countryside.
Students’ task
Which of these words do you hear? Number them in the order you hear them.
beach shops walks hometown
countryside schools nice
Read other posts in this series at the links below.
Teaching Listening and Speaking – From Theory to Practice: an introduction
Teaching listening #1 – Listening as comprehension
Teaching listening #2 – Bottom-up processing
Teaching listening #3 – Top-down processing
Teaching listening #4 – Teaching top-down processing
Teaching listening #6 – Listening as Acquisition
Teaching listening #7 – Implications
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