ELT365 · Day 153 — Bottom-up vs top-down listening

Idea — Bottom-up processing builds meaning from individual sounds upward; top-down uses prior knowledge and context to predict. Skilled listeners use both simultaneously.

Example — Hearing a weather forecast, you already expect “temperature”, “rain”, “degrees” — top-down. Catching the actual number spoken is bottom-up.

Try — Ask a learner to predict five words before playing a short news clip. Which predictions were right?

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