Which of the following is a top-down listening process and which of them is a bottom-up process? (a) Listening for the main idea, predicting, drawing inferences and summarizing. (b) Listening for the specific details like sounds, words and chunks.

Which of the following is a top-down listening process and which of them is a bottom-up process? (a) Listening for the main idea, predicting, drawing inferences and summarizing. (b) Listening for the specific details like sounds, words and chunks. Correct Answer (b) is bottom-up process and (a) is top-down process

Language skills are necessary for effective communication in any environment and to interact with others. It allows an individual to comprehend and produce language for proper and effective interpersonal communication.

• The four basic language skills and their natural order are listening-speaking-reading-writing. These foundational skills of language are divided into two categories which are receptive and productive skills.

Key Points

Top-down process:

• A top-down listening process is a listening approach that focuses on looking at language as a whole rather than individual sounds, words, and phrases. For example, a listener starts with the main idea, predicts, draws inferences, and summarizes.
• It makes learners understand the subject matter without necessarily going into detail about the particular topic. Summarising and Extrapolative questions aim at promoting Top-down listening processes:

Bottom-up process:

• In the Bottom-up Model of listening process, the learners move from part to whole as it is a listening process that focuses on decoding messages moving from sounds to words, phrases, clauses, and other grammatical elements to sentences.
• It concentrates on individual sounds, words, chunks, and phrases while listening, rather than the meaning of the text as a whole. Dictation and Cloze tasks aim at promoting bottom-up listening processes.

Hence, it is clear that (b) is a bottom-up process and (a) is a top-down process.