Traditional theories of listening comprehension
Bottom-up listening
Example: listening to directions from a friend on how to get to his/her house. This kind of listening comprehension is achieved by dividing and decoding the sounds - bit by bit.The ability to separate the
stream of speech
into individual words becomes more important here, if we are to recognize, for example, the name of a street or instructions on how to take a particular bus
Understanding vocabulary and other specific parts of speech is also very important for this kind of listening.