Listening_Speaking_CLASE2
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JESS CrazyshoesPlanning Listening Comprehension
Lessons
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Top-down and Bottom-up Approaches to
Listening
Taking into account the characteristics of oral discourse and the challenges of
teaching listening discussed in class 1, let’s analyze now some possible
courses of action that could be followed to implement the teaching of listening
comprehension successfully in class.
Some authors draw a practical distinction between intensive and extensive
types of listening. According to Harmer (2010: 134) extensive listening refers
to listening which is done “away from the classroom, for pleasure or some other
reason”, when learners listen to songs or watch videos for example, without the
intervention of the teacher. Whereas in the case of intensive listening,
learners listen “in order to work on listening skills, …when teachers are present
to guide students through any listening difficulties, and point them to areas of
interest”.
Apart from that, with regard to how information is processed, we can find the
so called BOTTOM-UP approach to processing of information which, according
to D.H. Brown (2000) implies going from sounds, to words, to grammatical
relationships and to lexical meanings, etc.; up to a “message”, in other words,
“building up the message from individual small pieces” (Scrivener, 2005: 178).
Whereas in the case of the TOP-DOWN approach, the message “is evoked
from a bank of prior knowledge and global expectations (Morley,1991: 87) and
other background information (schemata) that the learner brings to the text,
making use of what we already know to help us predict the structure
and content of the text and getting a general overall impression of the
message”(Brown, 2000: 178).
Bottom-up strategy: the message is built up from individual small pieces, almost like a puzzle.
Top down approach:
As regards young learners in particular, Lynne Cameron (2005:40) notices that
In active listening, the goal of the mental work is to make sense, e.g. of a story
or instructions, and is thus naturally meaning-focused rather than form-focused.
For example, children listening to a story told in the foreign language from a
book with pictures will understand and construct the gist, or outline meaning, of
the story in their minds” , emphasizing the primacy of meaning over form.
You can get further insight into the teaching of listening to young learners in
Trowbridges’s article on kids and Listening available
at: https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/kids-listening, listed also
under Reading materials.
As listeners, when we process information, we tend to integrate bottom-up and
top-down strategies, even though we are actually unaware of that. But when
teaching listening, as professionals, we need to be clear about the aims of the
steps of our didactic intervention. As we have seen, each approach fulfills
different listening needs: understanding the general idea or gist of the message,
decoding some specific words, getting the mood of the text, disambiguating
some sounds and/or words, etc.
So, how shall we proceed in our lessons then?
Given that the top-down approach resembles more the type of listening we do in
real life, by starting from what listeners bring to the text (previous knowledge on
the topic or schemata) and their expectations and purposes, we would rather
then begin our lessons from top down work moving on to some bottom-up work,
if required, as the lesson unfolds. You can go deeper into the theory of the
nature of listening and its pedagogical implications by consulting Rost’s chapter
on Listening under Reading materials.
Purposes for listening
The different purposes embedded in the listening process can include the
understanding of:
the general idea (or gist) of the message (whether the text is an interview
or a story),
its general mood or tone (through paralinguistic clues),
specific information (figures, a place, an opinion or point of view).
These purposes, in turn, are also related to specific strategies and techniques.
For example, trying to get the main idea of a text, the gist, involves not only
dealing with and tolerating the ‘ambiguity’ of the text, but also avoiding the task
of understanding every single word, as overall comprehension is required, not
details. Whereas trying to make out specific information implies appropriate
parsing of the text into the different sense units, as well as a good command of
pronunciation features -sounds, accent, intonation, rhythm, etc., which will allow
the identification of specific items, ideas or words.
Models of Didactic Intervention in the
Listening Class
The planning of a listening class implies the sequencing of different steps that
respond to specific pedagogic and linguistic aims.
A traditional model to planning listening lessons includes three stages: pre-
listening, while-listening and post-listening. The pre-listening stage aims at
preparing learners for the listening ahead by calling on students´ schemata and
eliciting predictions on the content of the text. At the same time, it is the moment
when we set a reason for listening through a question or series of general
questions as a pre-task. The aim here is to make learners get acquainted with
the context, the speakers, the situation as well as to get an overall
comprehension or general idea or gist of the audio text.
The while-listening phase is devoted to work on specific information and details,
through the solving of a succession of different tasks, like matching, true or
false, multiple choice or filling gaps with the required information. After the
setting of the tasks, the audio text is played and then answers are checked.
In the post-listening stage, once students have analyzed and worked on the
comprehension of the audio text thoroughly in the pre and while phases,
learners are invited to integrate another skill, usually a productive one: speaking
or writing. You can read more on this model in Peachey‘s article “A framework
for planning a listening skills lesson” under Reading materials.
Another model as regards the planning of listening implies the sequencing of
three elements: Task-Text and Feedback, known as the task-feedback-
circle (Scrivener, 2005: 174).
To begin with, there is a Lead in stage where the topic is introduced through a
discussion on pictures related to the topic, for instance. Then there is a Pre-
task phase, which is optional, where we usually work on predictions and also
pre-teach or recycle vocabulary that might appear later on in the audio text.
Afterwards, the first listening tasks is set and after the audio is played once,
feedback on the solving of the task is carried out. If students have been
successful in achieving the listening task, we proceed to another listening
activity. Otherwise we play the audio again or reframe the original task, by
making some modifications to it and adapting it finely to learners’ level of
challenge. In order to understand the whole text we can go round the TASK-
TEXT- FEEDBACK circle three or four times, depending on the number of tasks
we decide to set as well as on the
learners’ feedback to them. Finally, to conclude the lesson, we can tie up loose
ends and lead to another activity, by integrating another skill as follow up.
A traditional model
The Task-Feedback circle
As it can be easily perceived, both models reflect a communicative perspective,
given that they go from general understanding to more detailed meaning as well
as they integrate another communicative ability in the final stage.
Probably, the task feedback circle poses more emphasis on the process of
listening, itself though, as the assessing of learners’ comprehension after each
task and the gaining of positive feedback are necessary conditions to move
forward to the next listening challenge.
In this lesson, we have started by outlining the extensive and intensive types of listeni
on the typical top-down and bottom-up approaches to the teaching of listening comp
turn, analyze different situations and examples from our every-day practice. These app
a springboard to our next topic: the traditional and the task-feedback circle models
listening lessons. Here we have focused on the aims of the different steps as well
listening purposes that each move in the didactic sequence attempts to fulfill.
We are in conditions now to set out to our next lesson where we will look into
the process of understanding oral discourse in more depth and try to tie up any
loose ends regarding the complexities of the teaching of listening
comprehension in the classroom.
