ELT365 · Day 153 — Top-down vs bottom-up processing

Idea — Top-down: learners use context, topic knowledge, and prediction to build meaning. Bottom-up: they decode individual sounds or words first. Skilled listeners and readers do both simultaneously.

Example — Hearing ‘delayed flight’ triggers top-down schemas about airports; then ‘gate 14B’ bottom-up fills in the detail.

Try — Give learners a text headline only. Ask what they predict the text is about. This activates top-down processing before a single sentence is read.

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