In the modern methodology of English language teaching, top-down and bottom-up approaches can frequently be heard among language teachers and researchers

Аннотация

In the modern methodology of English language teaching, top-down and bottom-up approaches can frequently be heard among language teachers and researchers. Top-down and Bottom-up approaches: what is the difference? This article presents the results of investigation on the two approaches of listening. Furthermore, activities that entail top-down and bottom-up approaches are suggested. Top-down processing refers to the use of background knowledge to understand the information the listener receives. Bottom-up approaches happens when the listener analyzes the sounds, words, and/or grammar of the oral speech they listen to. To improve the listening quality of the learners, the teacher and researcher needs to have an idea what these two strategies mean and in what situations to use each one. Keywords: top-down, bottom-up, listening, processing, background knowledge, dictogloss, connected speech, comprehension. Introduction: Top-down strategies focus on the “big” picture and general meaning of a extening text. Often the starting point is to discuss the topic and then to use a “gist” or “extensive” task to listen for the overall meaning. Top-down strategies rely on students knowing something about the topic and either knowing how particular exchanges in certain social situations work (i.e. the functional and situational language common to certain exchanges) or what “chunks” of language ( expressions , etc)“fit” the particular topic or situation. Bottom-up strategies , on the other hand, focus on listening for details and involve tasks that focus on understanding at a sound or word level. Tasks are “intensive”, as they focus on looking for particular details. Top-down and Bottom-up processing in listening comprehension. The strategies that can help the students to overcome the problem in listening comprehension is to apply the Top-Down and Bottom-Up processing on classroom learning. Top-down processing in listening involves the liveliness of building mean based on presumption, conclusion, purpose, and other revelant knowledge. Bottom-up in listening is more detail in grammar and the meaning of words. As stated by Gebhard (2000) who divides the information process to two categories are bottom-up processing and top-down processing. Bottom-up processing refers to the understanding of the information process by sound analysis, word meaning, or grammar. Meanwhile, top-down processing refers to the using of schemata or the knowledge to understand the given information. The schemata relate to the speaker’s daily experience about the heard topic. In other hand, Helgesen (2003) states that there are five basic 122 YOSH OLIMLAR ILMIY-AMALIY KONFERENSIYASI in-academy.uz/index.php/yo principles in listening learning such as teaching students in two ways of information processing, teaching students about kinds of listening, teaching various assigments, consideration of difficulity and authentic text, teaching various types of listening processing, for examples guessing, drawing conclusion, monitoring, clarifying, responding and evaluating. 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 recognize 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