Top-down and bottom-up in ELT

Greetings to everyone

Have you ever been lost in a forest? How did you feel? When reading or listening, our students might have a similar feeling of getting lost in the text. They face different problems because of the two processes we use to comprehend written and spoken texts. Do you want to help your students to improve their reading and listening skills? Read our today’s newsletter and and you will find out how.

Top-down and bottom-up in ELT, and how to use them in your classroom

The terms top-down and bottom-up refer to the ways in which someone might process a spoken or written text. In many books, they are seen as two separate strategies that can be used by students to process and understand listening texts, but what exactly do they mean?

There is a distinction between top-down and bottom-up processing. “In metaphorical terms this can be likened to the difference between looking down on something from above – getting an overview – and, on the contrary, being in the middle of something and understanding where we are by concentrating on all the individual features. It is the difference between looking at a forest, or studying the individual trees within it”, writes Jeremy Harmer in his book ‘The Practice of English Language Teaching’.

Let’s have a look at the following example:

Barack Obama był 44-tym prezydentem Stanów Zjednoczonych Ameryki. Urodził się na Hawajach w 1961 roku. Jego żona ma na imię Michelle, mają 2 córki, Malia Ann i Sasha. Jego kadencja zakończyła się w 2017 r. Jego następcą jest Donald Trump.

Taken from ‘The New A-Z of ELT’ by Scott Thornbury.

If you don’t speak Polish but you understood the gist of the text, you were probably using top-down processes in order to assess the knowledge of the topic and the text type. These processes have been triggered by certain recognizable names and words. Without the right kind of pre-existing knowledge, comprehension becomes more difficult. That is the problem for some learners. In their L1 they have shared knowledge of cultural reference and discourse patterning which differs from that in the English variety they are dealing with. So, they have to work doubly hard to understand what they see or hear.

In many cases, students are locked into a bottom-up learning mode. They are desperately trying to understand every single word in a listening text. Unfortunately, in many situations this is just impossible. They become frustrated and demoralized and often give up.

In the top-down processing the reader or listener gets a general view of the reading or listening passage by, in some way, absorbing the overall picture.

In the bottom-up processing the reader or listener focuses on individual words and phrases, and achieves understanding by stringing these detailed elements together to build up a whole.

We as teachers have to be aware of the mental processes that lead to better understanding of a text. This will help us to decide what to do in the classroom to help learners read and listen better.

CLASSROOM IDEAS

• Identifying topic. Good readers and listeners are able to pick up the topic of a written or spoken text very quickly. It allows them to process the text more effectively as it progresses. Before reading or listening you can ask your students to brainstorm information on what they already know about the topic, predict the characteristics of the text genre, or ask what they would like to learn from the text / content (if they don't have a lot of previous knowledge about it).
• Predicting and guessing. Both readers and listeners sometimes guess in order to try and understand what is being written or talked about. Ask your students to predict what is coming, make assumptions or guess the content from their initial glance or half-hearing. The subsequent reading/listening will help them confirm their expectations. Use contextual and extra-linguistic information (such as pictures, layout, and headlines for reading, who is talking to whom about what and why – for listening).
• Pre-teaching key vocabulary. This helps with bottom-up processing. However, too much help may mean that students do not get sufficient practice in guessing from context.
• Skimming a text and listening for gist. Good readers and listeners are able to take in a stream of discourse and understand the general idea of it without worrying too much about the details. By encouraging students to read or listen for gist, we help them to be ready to read or listen for more specific information. They are not ‘lazy’ options. The students will use their processing powers to make more of a top-down view of what is going on.
• Reading and listening for specific information. We often go to written or spoken text because we want specific details. Students need to know how to ignore all the other information and come to the specific items they are looking for. You can ask your students, for example, quickly look through a film review and find the name of the actor or the director.
• Reading and listening for detailed information. This also includes listening for inferring speaker’s attitudes, intentions, etc. Such tasks are more demanding and require more intensive listening. It may be a good idea to break up the recording into sections, allowing the learners to consult each other before checking the task in open class.  You can also try listening bingos, dictogloss and gap-fills.

From Grade Education