Top Down Processing Strategies For YLs

Teaching younger teenage elementary learners to use top down processing strategies when listening (CEFR A1-A2)
Valentina Morgana
Valentina Morgana, Language Skills 2: Teaching younger teenage elementary learners to use top down processing strategies when listening (CEFR Level A1-A2)
Contents A. Introduction B. Analysis

a) Top-down and bottom-up processing b) Top-down processing:subskills c)Predicting content: context and co-text p.3 p.3 p.3 p.4 ! p.5 p.6 p.6 p.6 p.9 p.10 p.11 p.3
C. Issues for learners D. Suggestions for teaching

a) Selection and ordering b)Approaches and activities
Bibliography Appendix 1 Appendix 2
A. Introduction
Much of my teaching has been with Italian teenage elementary learners (CEFR A1-A2) in quite large classes (around 30 pupils). Because of the number of students the situation has not always been simple for listening activities and most of my learners often complain about how frustrating listening can be. One of them has recently made the following comment: When I listen to a story in Italian Im able to understand everything before the
Valentina Morgana, Language Skills 2: Teaching younger teenage elementary learners to use top down processing strategies when listening (CEFR Level A1-A2) 2
end, when I listen to it in English I feel I dont understand anything!. I then asked him: How do you listen in Italian? All the class reacted with a choral I dont know!. Younger teenage elementary learners often completely avoid the role of context and co-text in L2 even if they unconsciously use them in L1. This was the principle motivation behind my choice to investigate how to train elementary learners to predict in listening class. The more you can predict, the easier it becomes to understand (Lingzhu, 2003).
B. Analysis a) Top-down and Bottom-up processing

According to Richards (2008) two different kinds of processes are involved in understanding spoken discourse. These are often referred to as bottom-up and top-down processing. Both processing are applicable to reading and listening. Bottom-up processing (BUP) refers to the use of the listeners linguistic competence. Therefore, the direction of bottom-up processing is from language to meaning. Top-down processing (TDP), on the other hand, refers to the use of background knowledge in understanding the meaning of a message (Richards, 2008:7). Background knowledge refers to the knowledge of the world that the listener has developed in his/her life. It may be previous knowledge about the topic, situational knowledge, or knowledge stored in long-term memory about the events and the links between them (Richards, 1990). Richards refers to this background knowledge as schemata and scripts that a listener activates to understand a text. Top-down processing consequently goes from meaning to language. In order to have successful comprehension both bottom-up and top-down processing are needed. According to Richards (1990) bottom-up processing alone is often not sufficient for comprehension, so the listener should be able to make proper use of top-down processing. This essay explores approaches to the teaching of top-down processing and predicting content in particular, therefore bottom-up processing will not be further discussed.
b) Top-down processing: subskills

As stated above, in using prior knowledge about people and events comprehension proceeds from the top down. Examples of top-down processing subskills include: assigning places, persons, or things to categories; inferring cause-and-effect relationships; anticipating outcomes inferring the topic of a discourse inferring the sequence between events
(Richards, 1990:52) A good strategic listener is usually able to select and plan which subskills will activate in a particular situation. I have noticed that in second language learning top-down processing
ability in listening is not very well developed. In this respect I believe the ability to predict content plays a key role.
c) Predicting content: context and co-text

According to Goh (1998), predicting enables the listener to anticipate the next part of a text, such as a word, a phrase or an idea. Therefore the process of prediction involves listeners in selecting useful information from their own general experience and knowledge in order to identify text content (Lingzhu, 2003). Brown and Yule (1983) also remark that each learner constructs expectations on the basis of his/her knowledge. In order to understand this process I discuss how prediction/ inference can be used by native speakers to deal with a range of comprehension problems in terms of context and co-text. Predicting the context may vary depending on various aspects and can cause various problems. These are:
> Speaker: The listener usually makes predictions based on his/her experience of
previous speakers who have been similar to this speaker (politician, journalist or pleased/ kind etc. etc.). (Brown and Yule: 61). > Listener: In many circumstances the speaker addresses the listener using a particular language (Brown and Yule, 1983). Listeners build up expectations of the way in which the speaker will address them. E.g. two colleagues at a formal meeting. > Place: Place is a determinant of the situation. Listeners are expecting to hear different language in different situations. e.g. classroom (Brown and Yule, 1983) Sometimes can be difficult to understand what the situation is, for example when coming into a listening situation in the middle of a text e.g. you turn the radio on. The listener does not know what they are talking about but he/she can infer the topic by listening to key words. Eg We were half way down the motorway when we had a flat tyre and had to change it. The knowledge of the world tells the listener that they are talking about a fairly long car journey. > Time: When L1 speakers listen to stories, jokes etc., they create relations among the parts of discourse and are able to predict what can come next. Expressions like a year ago, after that etc. help the listener to understand the time of speaking and to create a context. > Genre: The listener will derive expectations from his/her knowledge of how the language is used for (Brown and Yule, 1983). E.g. anecdotes, news stories etc. > Topic: Brown and Yule (1983) argue that is the topic which determines the vocabulary that is selected. If the topic is going on holiday, then the vocabulary will include things that have to do with holidays (e.g. hotels, beach etc.). > Signal: sometimes the listener has to deal with an inadequate signal e.g. because of background noise or features of connected speech which mean that individual words
cannot be analysed. E.g. a native speaker or proficient speaker who hears I went into the XXX and ordered a drink in a British context has no problem identifying the unheard word as pub. Here the listener uses his/her knowledge of the world. But it might also be knowledge of the language. However much the words are obscured by elision, assimilation, catenation etc proficient language users can use their knowledge of the language to fill in the gaps. So if they hear He might XXX gone out their knowledge of the language tells them that the missing word must have been have. In listening comprehension we usually refer to co-text as what has been said in a particular event (Brown and Yule, 1983). This will generate expectation in the listener about what the speaker will be talking about. If a speaker is talking about how boring it is to study, the listener will expect to hear an anecdote/story/joke related to it. The listener tries to make a variety of predictions from every incoming sentence, which in turn provides him/her with more new information. It could happen that the listener deals with unknown words : e.g. if he/she hears The cormorants are nesting on the beach again. He/She can work out that cormorants are seabirds from the co-text and his/her knowledge of the world: birds make nests; the type of bird which nests on the beach is a seabird.
C. Issues for learners

This analysis raises several possible issues for learners. Lack of knowledge of the language makes TDP based on knowledge of the world even more important as a compensation strategy. Therefore skills like identifying topic from key words, and inferring the meaning of unknown words become even more important than they are for native speakers. Learners often feel frustrated when listening to spoken interaction. There are a number of reasons for this: 1. Predicting the grammar structure of spoken discourse raises many issues for learners. In my experience pre-intermediate and elementary learners have difficulty with momentto-moment lexical grammatical encoding at clause level. This tends to interfere with the discourse level (McCarthy, 1991). Learners may resist using TDP strategies even when those are available to them. As Field (2008) suggests, less skilled listeners should often rely on context to understand meaning because they find it easier than decoding language word by word. 2. Cultural identities also raise different issues for recognising a context. As Rots (2006) argues, in L2 listening there are frequently significant mismatches between the speakers and the listeners scripts (Richards,1983) (e.g. cinema scripts, library scripts, etc.) that lead to misunderstandings. Indeed, differences in schemata for culturally specific references and events leads to comprehension problems, as well as perceived social distance from the speaker (Rots, 2006). In multilingual/multicultural classes students often may lack many of these culturally specific scripts and comprehension may be difficult (Richards,1983). For example, cultural knowledge differences between Indian and American learners could lead to different interpretations of texts about marriages (Sadegh, 2006). Likewise Italian learners may have some comprehension problems with the notion of American calendar, starting with one weekend day (Sunday) instead of the first weekday (Monday) as in the Italian calendar.
3. Most elementary and pre-intermediate learners have problems recognizing predicted words because of native speakers connected speech. This means that consonants and vowels within words are affected by the position in which they occur. Consequently, patterns of juncture or assimilation are common, and word boundaries disappears. e.g. get on (geton) its no joke (snow joke) If beginner learners hear - The glass was already broken, its no joke (snow joke) . They will not be able to understand the meaning and they will need to use their previous knowledge and the context to understand it. While a proficient or advanced learner would not have problems recognizing the juncture. 4. The context where the listening task is taking place, plays a key role on the success of learners performance. I have noticed that students need to feel relaxed and self-confident in order to successfully work on prediction. Especially with young elementary learners, they should feel comfortable that even if the prediction is wrong, clear and positive support will be given to them. 5. Younger teenagers often avoid listening in English for the fear of listening to too many unknown lexical items. This problem might be caused by the choice of genre and topic inappropriate to the level of the students.
D. Suggestions for teaching a) Selection and ordering

As outlined above, the context where prediction activities take place plays a key role. To address this issue (see issue 4) I would first introduce a classroom listening habit in order to create a friendly atmosphere.Then I would gradually introduce different activities to enhance the students consciousness of prediction in order to form a natural and effective listening habit.
b) Approaches and Activities

I would recommend approaching listening tasks using a direct approach. Thornbury and Slide (2006) states that the direct approach involves understanding and planning a conversation programme around the specific microskills, strategies, and processes that are involved in fluent conversation. This approach stresses the importance of listening to and having conversations, but it also presupposes the need of a form-focused, instructional stage at some point in the lesson cycle (2006: 275). On the other hand, the indirect approach involves acquiring conversational competence through simply doing conversation. I believe listening and speaking skills are strictly related and the approach to teaching them should be so. From my experience, learners need to be trained on having conversations, which means they should be able to identify key strategies and forms that could help them while listening to and performing conversations.
All the coursebooks designed for Italian state schools I have looked at follow a standard receptive-skills procedure without noticing and training learners in specific subskills. Learners listen to recordings (usually a dialogue between friends) and then work on the text: answering gist questions, looking for detailed information (e.g. what music do they like?) or focusing on vocabulary. Once linguistic features are recognised, the teacher will present learners with the speaking task (e.g. talk to your partner about musical instruments) The activity is usually followed by a whole class check. No predicting content activity is planned. This is basically the approach taken in Kelly and Chiodini (2010), and Spencer (2007) (see appendix). Interestingly Barker and Mitchell (2008) approach some texts with a short predicting activity. Having read the title (e.g. Have you ever swum with a crocodile?), learners are asked to look at the pictures before reading/listening to the text and try to predict what the text is about (see appendix). This activity proved to be extremely useful in a young learner language classroom. Students started to be aware of a strategy they can rely on when listening to a text, and this started to make them feel more comfortable while listening. Moreover, since in my experience many young teenagers are mostly kinaesthetic and spatial learners, the use of pictures in predicting activities could help them to become involved in the activity. (Issue 5) As discussed above, many elementary learners have problems identifying connected speech or unknown words in English. In order to address these issues (Issue 3) I would suggest to first build confidence by showing students that they are able to infer. eg by starting from reading (because it is easier) and showing them sentences with a word they know and which is inferable replaced by XXX, then doing the same with spoken sentences where the unknown word is replaced by a beep. Other awareness and practice activities that could be useful to solve the issues presented above can be: Vocabulary building: e.g. T gives the title of a famous story from a book or film previously encountered in the classroom (e.g. Twilight), students create a list of words related to it. Rationale: Learners have the chance to work on vocabulary, they have time to think about the film/book and collaboratively recall keywords. In my experience this activity reduces the issues related to the real time nature of spoken language. In particular it will help to solve issues related to shared knowledge mentioned above (Issue 2) - no specific cultural context is involved, the use of film stories already discussed makes the context understandable for all students. Use of a reading text as model: e.g. read the text Great hobbies for teens. Students are asked to read a text and to notice some grammar structures and lexical items by working on the text (e.g. underlining, circling etc.). The teacher could also provide students with the correct pronunciation. Rationale: This activity will motivate elementary teenage learners and it will help them to understand and build up suitable language for the listening activity. It would also be a fruitful activity to solve the issue related to predicting grammar structure of spoken English (Issue 1). Learners notice the structure used, underlining it. They have the chance to see and work on a text with similar structure. It will make it easier to then recognise the same structure during listening. This activity will work as a preparation activity.
Bibliography
Brown, G. and Yule, G. (1983). Teaching the Spoken Language. 12th ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, S. (2006). Teaching listening. 1st ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barker, C. and Mitchell, L. (2008). Dynamic 2. 1st ed. Oxford: Macmillan Publishers Ltd. Goh, C.M.C. (1998), How ESL with Different Listening Abilities use Comprehension Strategies and tactics, Language Teaching Research. 2 (2) Kelly, P. and Chiodini, G. (2010). Thats it. 1st ed. Edizioni LANG, Pearson Italia. Lingzhu, J. (2003). Training the University English learners to Predict in Listening Class. Seen March 2011 at http://www.eric.ed.gov:80/ERICWebPortal McCarthy, M. (1991). Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers. 1st ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Richards, J.C. (2008). Teaching Listening and Speaking From theory to Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Richards, J.C. (1983). Listening Comprehension: approach, design, procedure. TESOL Quarterly 17:219-240. Richards, J.C. (1990). The language teaching matrix. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rots, M. (2006). Areas of research that influence L2 listening instruction in Current trends in the Development and Teaching of the Four Language Skills. Studies on Language Acquisition 29. Sadegh, K. (2007). The Key for Successful Reader-writer Interaction: Factors Affecting Reading Comprehension in L2 Revisited. Asian EFL Journal 9 (3): 198-215 Spencer, M. (2007). Result!. 1st ed. Oxford: Macmillan Publishers Ltd. Thornbury, S. (2006). How to teach speaking. Harlow: Longman. Thornbury, S. and Slide, D. (2006). Conversation: From Description to Pedagogy. 1st ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Appendix 1
Extract from Barker, C. and Mitchell, L. (2008). Dynamic 3, Macmillan - p. 62-63
Appendix 2
Extract from Kelly, P. and Chiodini, G. (2010). Thats it, edizioni LANG - p.92

Top Down Processing Strategies For YLs

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Top Down Processing Strategies For YLs

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Teaching younger teenage elementary learners to use top down processing strategies when listening (CEFR A1-A2)

Contents A. Introduction B. Analysis

C. Issues for learners D. Suggestions for teaching

Bibliography Appendix 1 Appendix 2

B. Analysis a) Top-down and Bottom-up processing

b) Top-down processing: subskills

c) Predicting content: context and co-text

C. Issues for learners

D. Suggestions for teaching a) Selection and ordering

b) Approaches and Activities

You might also like