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Week 2 Discussion
Why do you think it is important to recognize the difference between top-down and bottom-up types of activities? When is using top-down appropriate (to what purpose) and when is bottom-up appropriate? (in listening activities of course!)
4 comments:
It's important to recognize the difference between top-down and bottom-up types of activities because they require different things from the learners and those differences need to be accounted for when creating a task with a clear purpose.
Top-down type activities require the use of content and textual schema and so, the task should be relevant to its type. If a task requires the use of general knowledge, life experiences, and or knowledge of situational routines, then the task would be appropriate. For example, a friend is telling you about a breakup. According to the situation, whether they are happy or sad, what the impression or tone of the conversation is, etc, the listener provides the appropriate feedback.
Respectively, Bottom-up type activities focus on grammar, vocabulary, and sounds, so this type of task should have students use those things to interpret the information. For example, in a listening activity where you listen to someone giving you directions to somewhere. You listen for key vocabulary/sounds (street names, buildings, shops, left, right, straight ahead, between, across, etc).
Excellent, Sado! So, is it possible to create a lesson plan that develops language using both top-down and bottom-up approaches? If yes, how? What do the rest of you think?
When we teach listening in the classroom, we should consider both bottom-up and top-down processing methods because students have different listening processes. Therefore, I agree with what Sado said. In addition, a combination of both processes may prove to be very effective.
Top-down listening tasks should require students to use general knowledge based on life experience and common sense. This can be used in lecture listening activities; for example, if the speaker is lecturing on American history to foreign students, students can use their previous knowledge to help them understand the context more clearly. The activity that I stated above is similar to Sado’s because both of them require students to use general knowledge.
As Sado stated, bottom-up activities require students to focus on vocabulary, grammar, sounds, and functional phrases. As an activity, students may listen to a shopping list that a mother gave verbally to her son. This would require students to focus on listening to vocabulary and functional phrases that will be used during shopping such as price, brand, expiration date, size, and products etc.
Each processes will fit to both top down and bottom up types students who use their schema for finding out the target knowledge or use specific grammar points or vocabulary,etc to get the target information. The class will be perfect if we can know what the students type is.
However, we can't do know all types of students and each type of students will be in the same class.
I want to say that the class will be better if we use both one by one not the same time. for example, we can use first top down process for warm-up activities such as answering the authentic questions which is related with their lives with using students their own ideas or experiences before listening activities. Next, we have them find the listening techniques, target ideas, or grammatical points with bottom-up processing, and then, with that knowledge, we can use top down process again like listening quiz, practice exercises.
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