European Scholar Journal (ESJ)

Available Online at: https://www.scholarzest.com

Vol. 3 No.6, June 2022
ISSN: 2660-5562

THE USE OF TOP-DOWN AND BOTTOM-UP APPROACH ON

IMPROVING EFL LEARNERS’ LISTENING COMPREHENSION.
Yunusova Zilola
Uz JMCU
Senior teacher
Article history: Abstract:

Received: 20th March 2022 This article deals with explanation of the notion listening comprehension of
Accepted: 20th April 2022 English language learners. Listening is one of important skill in English. Many of
Published: 4th June 2022 learners feel difficult to learn listening especially in English. The definition of the
term “listening comprehension” by different scholars were identified. The usage
of the empirically examining the effectiveness of top-down and bottom-up
processing is described. The differences between these techniques were
analyzed. Using a multimedia as a teaching media is important in this process.
It can catch students attention of the lesson. This research discusses improving
listening skill using “top-down” and “bottom-up” techniques integrally.
Keywords: Listening, Listening Comprehension, Process, Approach, Top-Down, Bottom-Up, Skill, Prior Knowledge,
Linguistic Knowledge.

INTRODUCTION
Language is closely connected with four skills; listening, speaking, reading and writing. The first skill that a
native speaker develops is listening in learning any language; we can suppose that listening is the first skill that
language learners face in their learning or acquisition process. Most students and many teachers agree that a
student’s level of listening comprehension is far lower than any other linguistic skill they possess. Whilst their
comprehension of classroom discourse may in fact be high, thanks to their teacher’s and textbook’s reduction of
certain phonological features, their ability to comprehend native or non-native speakers of English outside of class,o
in the ‘real world’, is, in many cases, quite poor to the point where the student doubts their linguistic achievements or
believe that their homestay family speaks some bizarre dialect of English only comprehended by other native
speakers. “Listening is a fundamental language skill, but it is often ignored by foreign and second language teachers “
(Rebeccal, 1993). Listening is an active, purposeful process of making sense of what we hear (Helgesen, 2003).
Listening comprehension is a highly complex problem-solving activity that can be broken down into a set of distinct
sub-skills (Byrnes, 1984)
Listening is considered as a different process which includes an active and interactional action where listener
should have physical, passive and natural procedure and contemplated as mental process. It is called a skill that
spoken and non-verbal messages are responded. The attempt to accept the meaning of the spoken word after
receiving the speech sounds of intended message and responding the to oral communication effectively can be
defined as listening skill. Listening comprehension is an extremely important part of a language learning phenomenon.
Second language acquisition studies have illustrated that comprehensible output and input are crucial for the
acquisition of a language (Swain, 1995)
If learners want to learn to speak, they should first learn to understand the spoken language they hear. If
learners want to communicate with native speakers, they should first learn to understand in real language situations
to comprehend the main pint of what native speakers are telling. Therefore, listening is very important to which
teachers and learners should pay enough attention to obtain communication aims. Listening is very important in
language learning because it provides input for learners and it has also an important role in the development of
learners’ language knowledge (Rost, 1994).
The term “listening comprehension” has been defined by different authors. According to Nadig “Listening
comprehension is the different processes of understanding the spoken language. These include knowing speech
sounds, comprehending the meaning of individual words, and understanding the syntax of sentences” (Nadig,
A.2013).
Dirven and Oakeshott-Taylor defined listening comprehension as the product of teaching methodology and is
matched by terms such as speech understanding, spoken language understanding, speech recognition, and speech
perception (Dirven and Oakeshott-Taylor 1984).

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M, L Lynch states that listening comprehension as a communicative process where are audiences are engaged
in building meaning. Audiences grasp the oral information through sound segregation, existed knowledge, sentence
structures, stress intonation as well as the other linguistic or non-linguistic signs. (M, L. Lynch, 2005).

LITURATURE REVIEW
Listening comprehension is a cognitive and an interactive process of creating meanings that the speaker
intends, through the integral involvement of the hearer.
In the listening comprehension process listeners need to have two types of knowledge, they are linguistic and
non- linguistic knowledge. Linguistic knowledge consists of "phonology, lexis, syntax and discourse structure" and
the non-linguistic knowledge covers all comprehension features such as "topic, context, general knowledge about the
world and how it works" (Buck, 2001).
It must be mentioned that there are two possible ways of performing listening process: top-down and bottom-
up skills. This complex multistep procedure should be practiced in the classroom. As Koichi states, understanding the
listening process can help us to rethink the methods of teaching listening. For this purpose, there are two key
components for clarifying the listening process: the first is bottom-up and top-down processing; the second is schema
theory. (Koichi, 2001). Listening is an personally meaningful and conceptually coherent process for constructing
meaning in which two kinds of processes are involved at the same time: bottom-up and top-down processing.
Applying these processings can help the student to pass out the problem in listening comprehension on classroom
learning. Top-Down processing in listening involves the liveliness of building mean based on presumption,
conclusion, purpose, and other relevant knowledge. Bottom-Up in listening is more detail in grammar and the
meaning of words
In a top-down approach, we first introduce the topic and activate students schemata (Thornbury, 2006:202),
after that, we listen for gist to get a general idea about the text and then listen again for more specific or detailed
information. On the other hand, in a bottom-up approach, we focus more on perception and language skills and start
by recognising individual sounds, words and phrases in order to understand what is said (Harmer, 2001:201). Wilson
claims that “the long-term goal of teaching listening is to ensure a successful process (intelligent use of top-down and
bottom-up information and good strategy use) as much as a successful product (the correct answer)” (Wilson,
2008:17).
Peterson defines top-down processing as the higher level process "driven by listeners' expectations and
understandings of the context, the topic, the nature of text, and the nature of the world". On the other hand, he
defines bottom-up processing as the lower level process "triggered by the sounds, words, and phrases which the
listener hears as he or she attempts to decode speech and assign meaning"( Peterson 2001)
Bottom-up listening approach is text based which helps students recognize lexical and pronunciation features
to understand the text. Grammatical and lexical are applied to the analysis of the text. Individual words and phrases
are focused by a listener. Because of their direct focus on language forms at the word and sentence levels, bottom-
up exercises are particularly beneficial for lower level students who need to expand their language repertoire. As they
become more aware of linguistic features of the input, the speed and accuracy of perceiving and processing aural
input will increase. To develop bottom-up processing, students could be asked to differentiate sounds, word
boundaries, and stressed syllables, to point out thought groups, to be aware of for intonation patterns in utterances,
to distinguish grammatical forms and functions to identify contractions and connected speech to learn linking words.
Top-down listening approach relies on prior knowledge and experience to build the meaning of a listening text
using the information provided by sounds and words. To arrive at a meaning of a text, the listener draws on her
knowledge of the context, topic, speakers, situation, and the world, matching it to the aural input. Top-down listening
skills refers to listening for gist, main ideas, topic, and setting of the text, distinguishing specific information from
general information, sequencing the information, prediction, guessing, making an inference, figuring out what is
not directly said in the listening text. This approach begins with prior background knowledge contradictory to the
bottom-up listening approach.
Harmer indicates that in this processing , the listener tends to get the message' general view and absorb the
overall picture of the listening passage .This is helped if the listener has the ability to have appropriate expectations of
what is going to come across.(Harmer 2001).
Top-down listening strategies are listener-based; the listener taps into background knowledge of the topic, the
situation or context, the type of the text, and the language. This background knowledge activates a set of
expectations that help the listener to interpret what is heard and anticipate what will come next.
Lingzhu suggests several activities to activate students’ prior knowledge such as word association tasks, prior
questioning, making list of possibilities, ideas or suggestions, and looking at pictures before listening (Lingzhu 2003:2-
4).
In order to achieve our aim to improve listening skills using “top-down” and “bottom-up” processing, our
study was based on the collection and search of the theoretical and practical materials. Theoretical materials include
literature sources and review. Practical materials involve: to conduct a questionnaire (LSQ) about students’ attitude
toward listening skills using “top-down” and “bottom-up” processing; to identify learning efficient activities in
developing listening and speaking skills; and to find solutions in improving listening and speaking skills of students in
mixed level groups. The subjects of the study are 20 first-year students from different groups, they were randomly

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chosen. They range from 16-18 years of age. Of the 20 students, 8 students finished schools in different regions. The
duration of English classes university was different. Some have learnt English for 4 years; some of them have learnt
English for 3 years. The reason of choosing the first-year students for our study is our academic curriculum, and a
textbook “Speak out”. This book fully provides with listening and speaking activities. Curriculum on “Speak out” is the
same for all groups. We made some changes in curriculum for our research, and try to adapt listening and speaking
materials to mixed level groups.
In this study test helped us to create a group for our researching, and it is one of the easiest ways to compile
data in short period of time. The aim of test was to elicit students’ background of English, students’ attitude to
listening and speaking skills, students’ difficulties in listening and speaking. Data from the questionnaire were sorted
and analyzed statistically and displayed in tables. This test helped us to find fruitful learning activities in developing
listening and speaking skills using “top-down” and “bottom-up” processing, and to find solutions to reduce difficulties
in listening and speaking skills.
The learners of both groups were given a listening comprehension test at the beginning and the end of the
experimental period consisting of two parts: listening to separate words and listening to a text both recorded in white
noise. In the second task successful recognition of both separate words and sentences were analyzed. The results of
the listening comprehension test are shown in Table 1 (p % of the average mean of correct recognition).
Table 1.
Recognition of words and sentences in the listening comprehension test

Material Control Group Experimental

Group
At the beginning Words 19.6% 19.8%
of the experimental text (words) 23.3% 23.9%
period text(sentences) 14.7% 14.8%
At the end of the Words 23% 29.6%
experimental period text (words) 23.6% 33%
text(sentences) 16.7% 30.8%
It is seen from the table that at the beginning of the experimental period both groups demonstrated nearly
equal percentage of recognition. The results showed positive changes in recognition of separate words, and words
and sentences in the text in both groups but in the experimental group there was a more notable improvement. It
should be stated that the experiment took quite a short period of time but it was enough to show the positive
influence of the described approach. The set of exercises is quite limited in the experiment but there are some works
which can provide teachers with a wide range of tasks and exercises aimed at training bottom-up processing
(Vandergrift and Goh, 2012; Richards, 2008; Fedotova,2015)

DISCUSSIONS
The research provides evidence for importance of the consistent approach to teaching listening comprehension
based on one of the approaches so called bottom-up approach. The bottom-up approach involves listening exercises
which develop bottom-up processing helping learners to recognize individual words, sentences, and clause divisions,
recognize key linguistic features of the words and sentences. Such approach is effective when the L2 perception skills
are not developed enough.
The difference between two approaches is the following: For the Top-down process, students take into
account the context and do not need to pay attention on specific details while in Bottom up listening process,
students have to pay attention because here, specific details are very important to understand the whole meaning of
the conversation or another kind of listening activity. The listener focuses on individual words and phrases, and
achieves understanding by stringing these detailed elements together to build up a whole. Understanding the exact
word is more important.
To increase learners’ ability in listening comprehension, the teacher needs to realize what problems
overlooked by their learners. Since listening is still a big issue for English learners, so the process of Top Down and
Bottom Up need to be identified. Top-Down processing refers to the use of schemata or students’ knowledge in
understanding the information given, while Bottom-Up processing refers to the process of understanding information
through sound analysis, word meaning, and grammar.
In conclusion, bottom-up listening processing raises the awareness of linguistic elements of what they hear,
top-down listening process develops the prior background knowledge. Both approaches are considered as an active
skill which involves many processes: interaction where listener and speaker employ both prior knowledge and
linguistic knowledge.

LITERATURE:
1. Buck, G. (2010). Assessing Listening. Cambridge University Press
2. Byrnes, H. (1984). The Role of Listening Comprehension: A Theoretical Base. Foreign Language Annals, 17,
317-29

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3. Dirven, R., & Oakeshott-Taylor, J. (1984). Listening Comprehension (Part I). Language Teaching: The
International Abstracting Journal for Language Teachers and Applied Linguistics, 17(4), 326-343.
4. Harmer, J. (2001). The practice of English language teaching 3rd edition. Essex: Longman.
5. Helgesen, M. (2003). Teaching listening. In D. Nunan (Ed.), Practical English Language teaching. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
6. Koichi N. (2001). How to teach listening. Fukushima-Minami Senior High School Fukushima Prefecture, Japan-
2001.
7. Lingzhu, Ji. (2003). “Listening Activities for Effective Top-down Processing”. The Internet TESL Journal, Vol.
IX, No. 11.
8. Lynch, M, L. (2005). Using popular song to improve language listening comprehension skills. Retrieved
November 29, 2011.
9. Nadig, A. (2013). Listening Comprehension. Encyclopedia of Autism Spectrum Disorders, 1743.
10. Peterson, P. W. (2001). Skills and strategies for proficient listening. In M. Celce-Murcia (Ed.), Teaching
English as second or foreign language (3rd ed.) (pp. 87-100). Boston: Heinle & Heinle publishers.
11. Rost, M. (1994). Introducing Listening. London: Penguin books.
12. Swain, M. (1995). Three functions of output in second language learning. In G. Cook & B. Seidlhofer (Eds.),
Principle and practice in applied linguistics (pp. 125-144). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
13. Thornbury, S. (2006). An A-Z of ELT (Methodology): A dictionary of terms and concepts. Oxford: Macmillan
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