16
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" (Field, 1999). The
cognitive process of listening and reading in the target language indicates bottom-
up and top-down processes in SLA (Clement, 2007). It 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 long- term memory to decide the meaning, they use a top-
down strategy.
During a listening process, a combination of the two processos 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 (Vandergrift, 2007). Nevertheless, the aim of listening determines the
priority. To illustrate the point, think about the two situations given below:
• You are chatting with your friend and she tells you a story about an exam
that she failed. You listen to your friend to say something that will console her.
• One evening a friend of yours calls and invites you to her birthday party. You
carefully take note of the address, time and day of the activity.
In the first situation, we just listen to understand the main idea and give the
expected social response. However, in the second situation, we need to listen
carefully and understand the actual words in order not to have a problem later.
While we use top- down
processes in the first example, bottom-up processing is
used in the second.
Wason (2003) states that learners use top-down processing to make up for
their insufficient knowledge when they listen to a text where they have no prior
knowledge about the topic. For example, by showing some
relevant pictures or
giving some key words before the listening activity, teachers can stimulate top-
down process. Thus, leamers canuse their prior knowledgeto compensate the
unknown vocabulary. Other examples of top-down
listening activities, giving a
series of pictures or a sequence of events, or predicting the
relationship between
the people in the listening text.
17
Paying attention to linguistic features and decoding each sound and word for
semantic meaning requires the use of bottom-up listening process (Siegel, 2011).
Clement (2007) explains in detail how a leamer makes sense of a newly
encountered word by giving the example of the word "founder. She states that
the learners call to mind words that sound similar like "found, fan" at
the time
they hear the first letter of the word. As the next sounds are activated, some of
the words that do not match are sitted out. As the word found and founder will
be activated till the -er sound in realized, it will take
some time to isolate the
word "founder". Field (1999) asserts that this process takes no more than 25
seconds. As an example of bottom-up strategy, a dictogloss, which helps leamers
to notice the divisions between words, can be given. The teacher reads a few
sentences and asks students to write down how many words there should be in
the written form. The task may
sound simple, but weak forms can be problematic
for some learners: therefore, the teacher should speak in a natural way.
13
Some
example sentences are "She doesn't like it "Td better leave soon". "Let's go to
cinema" etc.
Dostları ilə paylaş: