Listening as Comprehension Listening as Acquisition
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towards the text to drive meaning from interpret the message.” Van Duzer; Buck in Claudie, 2006:9.
Top-down listening, then, infers meaning from contextual clauses and from making links between the spoken message and various types of prior
knowledge which listeners hold inside their heads.” Hedge, 2003:232. Top-down techniques are more concerned with the activation of schemata,
with deriving meaning, with global understanding, and with the interpretation of a text.” Brown, 2001:260.
It is the opposite of the bottom-up model. The bottom-up model is the learners start from their background knowledge, either general information
based on the previous learning and life experience content schemata or awareness of the kinds of information used in a given situation textual
schemata. For example, the language in public places such as hospital, office or airport is different from the language that people use in socializing with their
friends.
3 Interactive processing
According to Nunan in Claudie 2006:9, this model suggests that, in comprehending a discourse, they use information from more than one level
simultaneously, meaning that listening comprehension process does not necessarily start with bottom-up process to the top-to-bottom one or vice versa
but it happens at once. Comprehension is indeed an interactive process.
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Based on the descriptions above, there are the three models of listening learning process. They are bottom-up, top-down and interactive processing.
Each model has its own characteristics, advantages and disadvantages. Teachers have to be selective in deciding which model would best fit their
needs and appropriate to their students.