Listening strategies

1. Listening Processes

2. Top-Down vs Bottom-Up
Listening Processes

3. Imagine the following situations:
Over lunch, your friend tells you a story about a recent holiday,
which was a disaster. You listen with interest and interject at
appropriate moments, maybe to express surprise or sympathy.
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.

4. How do you listen in each case? Are there any differences?
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!

5. The way you listened to the holiday anecdote could be characterized as
top-down listening. This refers to the use of background knowledge in
understanding the meaning of the message.
Background knowledge consists of context, that is, the situation and
topic, and co-text, in other words, what came before and after. The
context of chatting to a friend in a casual environment itself narrows
down the range of possible topics. Once the topic of a holiday has been
established, our knowledge of the kind of things that can happen on
holiday comes into play and helps us to ‘match’ the incoming sound
signal against our expectations of what we might hear and to fill out
specific details.

6. TOP-DOWN LISTENING PROCESS:
Involves activating prior knowledge about a particular topic or theme, and
using this prior knowledge to help us make sense of the new story or
information we are hearing

7. OTHER EXAMPLES OF TOP-DOWN LISTENING ACTIVITIES:
• 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
EXAMPLE OF TOP-DOWN LISTENING PROCESS:
An experienced cook might listen to a radio chef describing a recipe for cooking chicken
to compare the chef’s recipe with her own.
She has a detailed outline to apply the task and listens to register similarities and
differences. She makes more use of top-down listening.

8. TOP-DOWN LISTENING STRATEGIES
• Identify the topic
• Identify the speaker
• Make a prediction
• Form pictures in your mind
• Stay focused
• Take notes

9. BOTTOM-UP LISTENING PROCESSES
• Many traditional classroom listening activities focus primarily on this
process 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.
• Bottom-up learning happens when students focus on words, structures,
and linguistic forms, instead of starting with meaning (language to meaning
process).

10. BOTTOM-UP LISTENING STRATEGIES
• Get ready for attention. Sit up straight and stay alert while you
listen
• Use your eyes, too. As you get ready to listen, remember that
your eyes can help alongside your ears.
• Repeat. Listen to the same phrase, sentence, or passage more
than once.
• Chunk it.
• Find key words.