1.

Before your class, identify parts of the audio that you feel will be most difficult for your
learners to understand.
2. Instead of designing a lengthy pre-listening activity with your students, provide them with
a bit of context, as students will not have the opportunity to predict the content during the
actual exam.
3. Provide learners with a transcript alongside the audio, so that they can go back through
the text and analyze specific areas in which they experienced difficulties when listening.

Speaking, from theory to practice. Richards (2008)

Listening Comprehension Process

Bottom Up Process

Top Down Process

Listening for Real Contexts

Top Down Process

Teaching top-down processing

Top-down processing, on the other hand, refers to the use of background

knowledge in understanding the meaning of a message. Whereas bottom-up
processing goes from language to meaning, top-down processing goes from
meaning to language. The background knowledge required for top-down
processing may be previous knowledge about the topic of discourse,
situational or contextual knowledge, or knowledge in the form of "schemata"
or "scripts" - plans about the overall structure of events and the relationships
between them. For example, consider how we might respond to the following
utterance: