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In 'real-life' listening, our students will have to use a combination of the two processes, with more emphasis on 'top-down'

or 'bottom-up' listening depending on their reasons for listening.


Top-down vs. bottom-up listening In the classroom Top-down listening activities Bottom-up listening activities Conclusion

Top-down vs. bottom-up listening Imagine the following situations: Over lunch, your friend tells you a story about a recent holiday, which was a disaster. You listen with interest and interject at appropriate moments, maybe to express surprise or sympathy. That evening, another friend calls to invite you to a party at her house the following Saturday. As youve never been to her house before, she gives you directions. You listen carefully and make notes. How do you listen in each case? Are there any differences? With the holiday anecdote, your main concern was probably understanding the general idea and knowing when some response was expected. In contrast, when listening to the directions to a party, understanding the exact words is likely to be more important if you want to get there without incident, that is! The way you listened to the holiday anecdote could be characterised as top-down listening. This refers to the use of background knowledge in understanding the meaning of the message. Background knowledge consists of context, that is, the situation and topic, and co-text, in other words, what came before and after. The context of chatting to a friend in a casual environment itself narrows down the range of possible topics. Once the topic of a holiday has been established, our knowledge of the kind of things that can happen on holiday comes into play and helps us to match the incoming sound signal against our expectations of what we might hear and to fill out specific details. In contrast, when listening to directions to a friends house, comprehension is achieved by dividing and decoding the sound signal bit by bit. The ability to separate the stream of speech into individual words becomes more important here, if we are to recognise, for example, the name of a street or an instruction to take a particular bus.

In reality, fluent listening normally depends on the use of both processes operating simultaneously. Think about talking to your friends (in your first language) in a noisy bar. It is likely that you guess the content of large sections of the conversation, based on your knowledge of the topic and what has already been said. In this way, you rely more on top-down processing to make up for unreliability in the sound signal, which forms an obstacle to bottom-up processing. Similarly, second-language listeners often revert to their knowledge of the topic and situation when faced with unfamiliar vocabulary or structures, so using top-down processing to compensate for difficulties in bottom-up processing. On the other hand, if a listener is unable to understand anything of what she hears, she will not even be able to establish the topic of conversation, so top-down processing will also be very limited. In the classroom In real-life listening, our students will have to use a combination of the two processes, with more emphasis on top-down or bottom-up listening depending on their reasons for listening. However, the two types of listening can also be practised separately, as the skills involved are quite different. 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 recognise 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 to use their top-down skills to fill in the gaps. The following procedure for developing bottom-up listening skills draws on dictogloss, and is designed to help learners recognise the divisions between words, an important bottom-up listening skill. The teacher reads out a number of sentences, and asks learners to write down how

many words there would be in the written form. While the task might sound easy, for learners the weak forms in normal connected speech can make it problematic, so it is very important for the teacher to say the sentences in a very natural way, rather than dictating them word-by-word. Some suitable sentences are:

Im going to the shop. Do you want some chocolate? Lets have a party! Id better go soon. You shouldnt have told him. What are you doing? There isnt any coffee. What have you got? He doesnt like it. Its quite a long way. Why did you think youd be able to? Can you tell him I called?

Learners can be asked to compare their answers in pairs, before listening again to check. While listening a third time, they could write what they hear, before reconstructing the complete sentences in pairs or groups. By comparing their version with the correct sentences, learners will become more aware of the sounds of normal spoken English, and how this is different from the written or carefully spoken form. This will help them to develop the skill of recognising known words and identifying word divisions in fast connected speech. Conclusion Successful listening depends on the ability to combine these two types of processing. Activities which work on each strategy separately should help students to combine top-down and bottomup processes to become more effective listeners in real-life situations or longer classroom listenings. Further reading

Anne Anderson and Tony Lynch (1988). Listening. Oxford University Press Jack Richards, Designing instructional materials for teaching listening comprehension, in The Language Teaching Matrix, Cambridge, 1990 Mary Underwood (1989). Teaching Listening. Longman Penny Ur (1984), Teaching Listening Comprehension, Cambridge. Magnus Wilson. Discovery Listening improving perceptual processing. ELT Journal Volume 57/4 (October 2003). Catherine Morley, Teacher, Teacher trainer, Mexico

The Natural Approach


27 September 2009 One Comment The natural approach developed by Tracy Terrell and supported by Stephen Krashen,is a language teaching approach which claims that language learning is a reproduction of the way humans naturally acquire their native language. The approach adheres to a communicative approach to language teaching and rejects earlier methods such as the audiolingual method and the situational laguage teaching approach which Krashen and terrell (1983) believe are not based on actual theories of language acquisition but theories of the structure of language The Natural Approach vs the Direct Method Although The Natural approach and the Direct Method (also called the natural method) share some features, there are important differences . Like the direct method the natural approach is believed to conform to the naturalistic principles found in second language acquisition. Unlike the direct method, however, it places less emphasis on teacher monologues, direct repetion,and formal questions and answers, and less focus on accurate production of target language sentences (Richards and Rodgers, 1986:129) Theory of language Krashen and Terrell view communication as the primary function of language, and adhere to a communicative approach to language teaching, focusing on teaching communicative abilities rather than sterile language structures. What really distinguishes the Natural approach from other methods and approaches are its premises concerning the use of language and the importance of vocabulary:

Language is viewed as a vehicle for communicating meaning and messages. Voacbulary is of paramount importance as language is essencially its lexicon!

This means that language acquisition can not take place unless the acquirer understands messages in the targe language and has developed sufficient vocabulary inventory. In fact it

should be easier to reconstruct a message containing just vocabulary items than one containing just the grammatical structures. Theory of learning Krashen grounded the Natural approach on a number of theory of learning tenets.
The Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis

Krashen makes a distinction between acquisition and learning.

Krashen defines acquisition as developing competence by using language for real communication. It is the natural way, paralleling first language development in children and refers to an unconscious process that involves the naturalistic development of language proficiency through understanding language and through using language for meaningful communication. Learning, however, refers to formal knowledge of a language. It is the process in which conscious rules about a language are developed. It results in explicit knowledge about the forms of a language and the ability to verbalize this knowledge. Formal teaching is necessary for learning to occur, and correction of errors helps with the development of learned rules.

The Monitor Hypothesis

Conscious learning can function only as a monitor or editor that checks and repairs the output of the acquired system. The Monitor Hypothesis states that we may use learned knowledge to correct ourselves when we communicate, but that conscious learning has only this function. Three conditions limit the successful use of the monitor: 1. Time. Sufficient time for a learner to choose and apply a learned rule. 2. Focus on form. Focus on correctness or on the form of the output. 3. Knowledge of rules. Knowing the rules is a prerequiste for the use of the monitor.
The Natural Order Hypothesis

The acquisition of grammatical structures proceeds in a predictable order. Certain grammatical structures or morphemes are acquired before others in first language acquisition of English, and the Natural Order Hypothesis claims that the same natural order is found in second language acquisition. It is also believed that errors are signs of naturalistic developmental processes. Similar developmental errors occur in learners during acquisition (but not during learning) no matter what their native language is
The Input Hypothesis

The Input Hypothesis relates to acquisition not to learning and states that people acquire language best by understanding input that is slightly beyond their level of competence. Krashen refers to this by the formula L +1 (where L+1 is the stage immediately following L along some

natural order.) Comprehension is achieved through linguistic and extra linguistic context clues including knowledge about the world, the context of the situation etc Comprehension preceds the emergence of speaking as fluency appears only as a result of the provision of sufficient comprehensible input. By comprehensible input Krashen means the utterances that learners understand based on linguistic and extralinguistic context and which consists of a sort of simplified code . He contends that when there is such comprensible input language acquisition proceeds successfully. Krashen also claims that when there is enough of such comprehensible input, L+1will usually be provided automatically and
Affective Filter Hypothesis

There are three types of emotional attitudinal factors that may affect acquisition and that may impede, block or freely passes necessary input for acquisition . These are motivation, self confidence and anxiety. Acquirers with high affective filter are less likely to develop comptence. In a nutshell Teaching according to the Natural Approach involves the following principles:

Teaching according to the Natural approach focuses on communicative abilities. One of its objectives is to help beginners become intermediate. Vocabulary is considered prior to synthactic structures. A lot of comprehensible input must be provided. Use of visual aids to help comprehension. Focus is on listening and reading. Speaking emerges later. Reducing the high affective filter by o focusing on meaningful communication rather than on form. o prividing interesting comprehensible input The technique used in this approach are often borrowed from other methods and adapted to meet the requirement of the approach. Thses include: o Total Phisical Response command drills o The Direct Method activities mime, gestures and context are used to elicit questions, and answers. o Communicative Language Teaching group work activities where learners share information to complete a task.

Conclusion The Natural Approach belongs to a tradition of language acquisition where the naturalistic features of L1 acquisition are utilized in L2 acquisition. It is an approach that draws a variety of techniques from other methods and approaches to reach this goal which is one of its advantages. But the originality of this approach does not lie in these techniques but on the emphasis on activities based on comprehensible input and meaningful communication rather than on only grammatical mastery of language.

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