Evaluating listening skills

di E. Darling, British Council

Task 1.2. Developing listening sub-skills – 'top down' and 'bottom up' processing

(30 minutes)

We will now look at the sub-skills involved in listening. In the same way as when we read a text, when we listen to texts, we use different strategies to get information about the main idea being presented and about details in the text.


What do you know or understand about the terms 'top down' and 'bottom up' processing?

Once you have answered this question, read the following excerpt from the TeachingEnglish website to find out more:

"Listening strategies can be defined as top down or bottom up processing.

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 you've 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 friend's 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."

  • While you are reading, think about and answer the following questions:
    • In your opinion, which process do our students use more, top down or bottom up processing?
    • Are your students aware of these two approaches to listening?
    • How should we help students to develop both top down and bottom up processing skills?
    • When should we allow our students to read the text they are listening to?
  • Compare your answers with the suggested answers below:
    • Students will tend to focus on every word and sound to try to understand a listening text in a foreign language. They will attempt to use bottom-up processing and this means that they will often become blocked when they don't recognise a word, for example. Learning to employ top down processing is particularly valuable for low level learners, as they can learn to depend on their world knowledge to help them understand texts, even if they do not have much vocabulary.
    • Students will be unaware that they use "top-down" processing in their own language. By raising awareness of a variety of different listening strategies, we will help them to be more successful at listening.
    • When teaching we need to give practice in both types of listening. We need to include exercises that get students to predict what they might hear in a given context, that get students to listen only for general information and to listen out for the gist of the listening. We also need to focus on listening for specific details in a text.
    • In order to practise listening skills, students must not read the text before or while listening as this only helps them to develop their reading skills. It is tempting with weaker students to let them read and listen at the same time, but this is counterproductive. The solution is to prepare students well before listening by getting them to employ top-down strategies, such as using their world knowledge and prediction to help them be prepared to understand a listening better. It can be very useful to follow up listening skills activites by letting students listen and read the tapescript because this can help them to develop their bottom up strategies. Here the teacher can raise awareness of various pronunciation features, such as linking, contractions, stress on content words and intonation etc. The teacher can develop this further by focusing on a specific area of pronunciation and getting students to mark this feature on the written text.