[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 2 | January 11, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]
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.