Abstract:

The talk explores the complex process of listening comprehension in Russian EFL (English as a foreign language) learners. I review the existing scholarly writing on the top-down and bottom-up strategies that listeners employ (knowingly or subconsciously) to understand the acoustic input. From the bottom-up perspective, listening comprehension is a linear process occurring in consecutive stages, each providing output that later serves as input for the next stage. In other words, listeners start by decoding phonemes and then move on to the higher levels such as words, utterances, etc., with meaning being the final step (Field, 2008). However, empirical evidence shows that there are limitations to this rather linear approach. As recognised in Buck (2001), listening comprehension does not occur in a fixed sequence. It seems that different types of processing may occur simultaneously. Moreover, successful decoding of the meaning does not always depend on the acoustic input itself but also on the context, communicative situation, and the listener’s general knowledge about the world (Field, 2008). The processing that takes these factors into consideration is top-down. It relies heavily on the listener’s background knowledge. Finally, I build a case towards an interactive model of listening which seems to describe the actual comprehension process more accurately, since both top-down and bottom-up processing occur simultaneously and complement each other (Wilson, 2008). I then proceed to analyse the common listening activities found in popular EFL course books and demonstrate the existing bias towards top-down listening skills development at the expense of the bottom-up processing.

References:
[1] Field, J. (2008). Listening in the Language Classroom. NY: CUP.
[2] Buck, G. (2001). Assessing Listening. NY: CUP.
[3] Wilson, J. J. (2008). How to Teach Listening. Harlow: Pearson Education.

Keywords:

Listening comprehension, EFL, teaching listening, receptive skills, top-down strategies, bottom-up strategies, interactive model of listening.