Introduction the role of listening in teaching foreign languages 2

Approaches to the teaching of listening skills and modern methods

The bottom-up and top-down concepts originated from computer science before being adopted by the field of linguistics. In computer science, bottom-up means “data-driven” and top-down means “knowledge-driven”. The cognitive process of listening and reading in the target language indicates bottom-up and top-down processes in SLA. If listeners use linguistic knowledge clues such as phonemes, syllables, words, phrases and sentences to understand, it means that they use a bottom-up strategy. However, if they use context and prior knowledge such as topic, genre, culture and other schema knowledge stored in longterm memory to decide the meaning, they use a top-down strategy. During a listening process, a combination of the two processes is used to make the text sensible for the listener. Thus, it is generally accepted that top-down and bottom-up processes are utilized together during the listening process. Nevertheless, the aim of listening determines the priority.