C Which of the following statements about listening in language learning is correct?
(A)The top-down processing model assumes that listening is a process of decoding the sounds.
(B) The bottom-up view suggests that the listener constructs the meaning of the speaker using incoming sounds as clues.
(C) Listening is vital in the language classroom because it provides input for the learner.
(D)In reciprocal listening, the listener is not required to take part in the interaction.

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(A)The bottom-up processing model assumes that listening is a process of decoding the sounds.
(B) The top-down view suggests that the listener constructs the meaning of the speaker using incoming sounds as clues.
(C) Listening is vital in the language classroom because it provides input for the learner.
(D)In reciprocal listening, the listener is not required to take part in the interaction.

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What?

Top down listening happens when we use background knowledge to make sense of what we are listening to. We already know a fair amount about the topic, and the story or information we are getting fits into a previously established schema.

Bottom up listening, on the other hand, happens when we understand language sound by sound or word by word, with less use of background knowledge.

Most of the time, your students will combine some bottom up and top down listening to make sense of what they hear and perceive in the world around them. Sometimes, however, it can be helpful to offer them strategies suited to the specific type of listening you are working on. The more cognizant students are about each type of listening and the strategies it embeds, the better equipped they will be to do good listening work.

 

How?

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.

 

參考資料:

Listening: Top down and bottom up

Top Down & Bottom Up Listening Strategies in the Classroom