1. Introduction
Listening is the language skill that is used most frequently. It has been
estimated that adults spend almost half their life communication time listening, and
students receive most of their information through listening to teachers, professors
and to one another. However, the students do not recognize the importance of the
development of this skill; this is one of the reasons we as teachers have to do
activities to better understand listening.
It is necessary to bear in mind that this is not only a process of receiving and
recording aural input, but listeners actively involve themselves in the interpretation
of what they hear, they usually bring their own background knowledge and
linguistic knowledge to bear on the information contained in the information. In
addition, listening process is not the same every time and every person requires
different strategies while listening; for instance, casual greetings require a different
sort of listening capability than do academic lectures or political speeches.
In this paper we present information gotten in our first study on bottom-up
and top down strategies, applied to intermediate students of English. Since
language learning requires intentional listening, we applied some strategies to
identify the ones that were useful for our students. Here we present some ideas
which might help your students to improve their listening learning.