ELT365 · Day 155 — Bottom-up processing — building meaning from words

Idea — Bottom-up processing starts with individual sounds or words and builds meaning upward. Learners decode the text piece by piece rather than using context or schema.

Example — A learner who doesn’t know the topic uses bottom-up processing to decode an unfamiliar medical text, word by word, sentence by sentence.

Try — Give learners a short text with no title or images. Can they still understand it? Notice where bottom-up processing works hardest.

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