English Teaching

ELT365 · Day 153 — Top-Down Processing: Meaning Comes First

📚60-Day ELT Masterclass — This post is part of an ongoing series. View full index →

Idea — Top-down processing means using background knowledge, context, and expectation to interpret a text before analysing individual words. The brain predicts before it decodes.

Example — When you see a menu, you already know roughly what language to expect — prices, dish names, descriptions. That expectation speeds reading before a word is processed.

Try — Show learners a title and image only. Ask them to predict three words they will find in the text. Then check.

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