BOTTOM-UP AND TOP-DOWN APPROACHES IN ENGLISH LESSONS

Аннотация

Top-down and bottom-up approach are essential in teaching English, especially reading and listening. In teaching English at academic lyceums and schools it is required using both of them in order to increase the level effectiveness of learning new theme. Top-down processing leads the learners to have the general idea first and eventually into the details. Bottom-up approach pays attention to small units in the text or listening first and from details to the main idea of the text. The purpose of this article is to give detailed description of top-down and bottom-up approaches and an example of the lesson where these approaches used in the way of activities with some exercises. KEYWORDS: - Top-down approach, bottom-up approach, teaching English, reading, listening, psycholinguistic model, academic lyceum, pre-intermediate, reading passage, web tool, assessment. graphic or audio signals is transformed and stored I NTRODUCTION in the students’ memory of a written or oral message. The bottom-up model not only defines the The psycholinguistic model of receptive types of approach to extracting information from the text, speech activity (reading and listening) "from the but also outlines the way to form the speech bottom up" opposes the model of understanding functional system of a foreign language - the and processing information "from the top down". piecemeal assimilation of all the main components The bottom-up model is based on the idea of of this system, their accumulation, integration. The reading and listening as sequentially unfolding ultimate goal is considered to be the unification of processes of decoding incoming information "from all elements into one whole, that is, the below", that is, from recognizing graphemes and understanding of the text read or listened to. phonemes to words, from words to sentences, from sentences to super-phrasal units and to Top-down and bottom-up approaches in English understanding the text as a whole. This model lessons. explains how information received in the form of In many cases, students are in a bottom-up learning CURRENT RESEARCH JOURNAL OF PHILOLOGICAL 155 SCIENCES ISSN – 2767-3758 https://masterjournals.com/index.php/crjps CURRENT RESEARCH JOURNAL OF PHILOLOGICAL SCIENCES 2(12): 155-160, December 2021 DOI: https://doi.org/10.37547/philological-crjps-02-12-30 ISSN 2767-3758 ©2021 Master Journals Accepted21thDecember, 2021 & Published 26thDecember, 2021 mode. They are desperately trying to understand communicates with whom, what and why - for every single word in the text they are listening to. listening). Unfortunately, in many situations this is simply not possible. They are often disappointed and just give We pre-teach the key vocabulary. This helps with up. Therefore, it should be remembered that during bottom-up text processing. However, this should top-down text processing, the reader or listener not be abused, because then students will not learn gets a general view of the passage to read or listen to guess the meaning of words from the context. We to. In the process of processing "from the bottom use the techniques of skimming to read the text and up", the reader or listener focuses on individual listening for gist. Good readers and listeners are words and phrases and achieves understanding by able to perceive the flow of discourse and connecting these detailed elements together, thus understand its general essence without being creating a single whole. distracted by details. By encouraging students to read or listen in order to grasp the essence, we help As teachers, we must be aware of the mental them to be prepared for reading and listening to processes that lead to a better understanding of the more specific information. In this way, students will text. This will help us decide what to do in class to use their opportunities to take more for themselves help students read and listen better. from the top-down study of what is happening. We read and listen for specific information. We often In this article I am going to suggest some ideas for turn to written or spoken text because we want English lessons at academic lyceums or schools specific details. Students should know how to where students have pre-intermediate level of ignore any other information and find specific English. We define the topic. Good readers and information. We can ask our students, for example, listeners are able to identify the topic of a written or to quickly review a movie review and find the name spoken text very quickly. This allows them to of the actor or director. process the text more efficiently during the reading process. Before reading or listening, you can ask We read and listen to understand the details. This your students to brainstorm on what they already also includes listening for conclusions about the know about this topic, provide for the attitude, intentions of the speaker, and the like. characteristics of the genre of the text, or ask what Such tasks are more demand