ELT365 · Day 152 — Receptive skills: what listening really is

Idea — Listening is active meaning-building, not passive reception. Learners run two processes at once: bottom-up (decoding sounds and words) and top-down (using context and expectation to predict).

Example — Hearing “d’you wanna cuppa?” a learner who only decodes sounds is lost; one using context (a kitchen, a kettle) gets it.

Try — Before your next listening task, give learners the topic and one question. Notice how prediction sharpens what they catch.

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