Over lunch, your friend tells you a story about a recent holiday, which was a disaster. You listen with interest and interject at appropriate moments, maybe to express surprise or sympathy.
That evening, another friend calls to invite you to a party at her house the following Saturday. As you’ve never been to her house before, she gives you directions. You listen carefully and make notes.
The bottom-up process occurs when listeners
use linguistic knowledge-splitting the sounds
heard into small parts-phonemes or syllablesto
help interpret the meaning of the whole oral
message. The top-down process occurs when
listeners use prior knowledge such as topic
knowledge, listening contexts, or socio-cultural
knowledge stored in long-term memory to
help comprehend what they hear. If the
learners are able to simultaneously combine
these two processes together, an interactive
process is developed, and then listening
comprehension can be completed [3, 13].
Subsequently, such processes are developed
into major parts of cognitive strategies that
help listeners relieve listening difficulties and
facilitate the interpretation of spoken texts.