ELT365 · Day 153 — Top-down and bottom-up, working together

Idea — Skilled listeners and readers swing between two processes: bottom-up (decoding the actual words and sounds) and top-down (using knowledge of the world and the topic to predict). Neither alone is enough.

Example — A learner who knows a menu is coming can guess "starter" and "main" before catching every sound; pure decoding would stall on the first unknown word.

Try — Take any short text. Underline two words a learner could guess from context alone — proof that top-down support reduces the decoding load.

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