Theories of Reading

Theories of reading This article is in two parts. The first part will look at some of the shifts and trends in theories relating to reading. The second part will examine tips and guidelines for implementing a theory of reading which will help to develop our learners' abilities. 

The traditional view

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The cognitive view

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The metacognitive view

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Conclusion

Just like teaching methodology, reading theories have had their shifts and transitions. Starting from the traditional view which focused on the printed form of a text and moving to the cognitive view that enhanced the role of background knowledge in addition to what appeared on the printed page, they ultimately culminated in the metacognitive view which is now in vogue. It is based on the control and manipulation that a reader can have on the act of comprehending a text. The traditional view According to Dole et al. (1991), in the traditional view of reading, novice readers acquire a set of hierarchically ordered sub-skills that sequentially build toward comprehension ability. Having mastered these skills, readers are viewed as experts who comprehend what they read. 

Readers are passive recipients of information in the text. Meaning resides in the text and the reader has to reproduce meaning.

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According to Nunan (1991), reading in this view is basically a matter of decoding a series of written symbols into their aural equivalents in the quest for making sense of the text. He referred to this process as the 'bottom-up' view of reading.

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McCarthy (1999) has called this view 'outside-in' processing, referring to the idea that meaning exists in the printed page and is interpreted by the reader then taken in.

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This model of reading has almost always been under attack as being insufficient and defective for the main reason that it relies on the formal features of the language, mainly words and structure.

Although it is possible to accept this rejection for the fact that there is over-reliance on structure in this view, it must be confessed that knowledge of linguistic features is also necessary for comprehension to take place. To counteract over-reliance on form in the traditional view of reading, the cognitive view was introduced.

The cognitive view The 'top-down' model is in direct opposition to the 'bottom-up' model. According to Nunan (1991) and Dubin and Bycina (1991), the psycholinguistic model of reading and the top-down model are in exact concordance. 

Goodman (1967; cited in Paran, 1996) presented reading as a psycholinguistic guessing game, a process in which readers sample the text, make hypotheses, confirm or reject them, make new hypotheses, and so forth. Here, the reader rather than the text is at the heart of the reading process.

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The schema theory of reading also fits within the cognitively based view of reading. Rumelhart (1977) has described schemata as "building blocks of cognition" which are used in the process of interpreting sensory data, in retrieving information from memory, in organising goals and subgoals, in allocating resources, and in guiding the flow of the processing system.

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Rumelhart (1977) has also stated that if our schemata are incomplete and do not provide an understanding of the incoming data from the text we will have problems processing and understanding the text.

Cognitively based views of reading comprehension emphasize the interactive nature of reading and the constructive nature of comprehension. Dole et al. (1991) have stated that, besides knowledge brought to bear on the reading process, a set of flexible, adaptable strategies are used to make sense of a text and to monitor ongoing understanding. The metacognitive view According to Block (1992), there is now no more debate on "whether reading is a bottom-up, language-based process or a top-down, knowledge-based process." It is also no more problematic to accept the influence of background knowledge on both L1 and L2 readers. Research has gone even further to define the control readers execute on their ability to understand a text. This control, Block (1992) has referred to as metacognition. Metacognition involves thinking about what one is doing while reading. Klein et al. (1991) stated that strategic readers attempt the following while reading: 

Identifying the purpose of the reading before reading

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Identifying the form or type of the text before reading

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Thinking about the general character and features of the form or type of the text. For instance, they try to locate a topic sentence and follow supporting details toward a conclusion

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Projecting the author's purpose for writing the text (while reading it),

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Choosing, scanning, or reading in detail

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Making continuous predictions about what will occur next, based on information obtained earlier, prior knowledge, and conclusions obtained within the previous stages.

Moreover, they attempt to form a summary of what was read. Carrying out the previous steps requires the reader to be able to classify, sequence, establish whole-part relationships, compare and contrast, determine cause-effect, summarise, hypothesise and predict, infer, and conclude. Conclusion In the second part of this article I will look at the guidelines which can also be used as general ideas to aid students in reading and comprehending materials. These tips can be viewed in three consecutive stages: before reading, during reading, and after reading. For instance, before starting to read a text it is natural to think of the purpose of reading the text. As an example of the duringreading techniques, re-reading for better comprehension can be mentioned. And filling out forms and charts can be referred to as an after-reading activity. These tasks and ideas can be used to enhance reading comprehension. This article published: 23rd March, 2006 was first published in Iranian Language Institute Language Teaching Journal Volume 1, No.1 Spring 2005. Further reading Barnett, M. A. (1988). Teaching reading in a foreign language. ERIC Digest Block, E. L. (1992). See how they read: comprehension monitoring of L1 and L2 readers. TESOL Quarterly 26(2) Dole, J. A. Duffy, G. G., Roehler, L. R., and Pearson, D. D. (1991). Moving from the old to the new: research on reading comprehension instruction. Review of Educational Research 61 Dubin, F., and Bycina, D. (1991). Models of the process of reading. In Celce-Murcia (ed.), Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language. Boston, Mass.: Heinle and Heinle. Duke, N. K., and Pearson, D. P. (n.d.). Effective practices for developing reading comprehension. Available at //effective reading.com/ (Oct. 15, 2001). Estes T. H. (1999). Strategies for reading to learn. Available at www.reading strategies. Fitzgerald, J. (1995). English-as-a-second-language learners' cognitive reading processes: a review of research in the United States. Review of Educational Research 65 Klein, M. L., Peterson, S., and Simington, L. (1991). Teaching Reading in the Elementary Grades. Needham Heights, Mass.: Allyn and Bacon. Lebauer, R. (1998). Lessons from the rock on the role of reading. Available at // langue.Hyper.Chubu.ac.jp/jalt/pub/t/t/98/lebauer.html McCarthy, C. P. (n. d.) Reading theory as a microcosm of the four skills. Applied Linguistics Series. Nunan, D. (1991). Language Teaching Methodology. Hertfordshire: Prentice Hall International. Paran, A. (1996). Reading in EFL: facts and fiction. ELT Journal 50 Rumelhart, D. E. (1977). Toward an interactive model of reading. In S. Dornic (ed.), Attention and Performance IV. New York, NY: AcademicPress. Steinhofer, H. (1996). How to read nonfictional English texts faster and more effectively. The Internet TESL Journal, Vol. II, No. 6, June 1996 Ur, P. (1996). A Course in Language Teaching. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press. Vaezi, S. (2001). Metacognitive reading strategies across language and techniques. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Allameh Tabataba'iUniversity, Tehran, Iran. Van Duzer, C. (1999). Reading and the Adult English Language Learner. Washington, D.C.: Clearinghouse for ESL Literacy Education

Shahin Vaezi Ph.D. Assistant professor, University of Science and Technology, Iran

This article is the second of two parts. The first part looked at some of the shifts and trends in theories relating to reading. This second part will examine tips and guidelines for implementing a theory of reading which will help to develop our learners' abilities. 

Text characteristics

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Pre-reading tips

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During-reading tips

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After-reading tips

These tips can be viewed in three consecutive stages: before reading, during reading, and after reading. For instance, before starting to read a text it is natural to think of the purpose of reading the text. As an example of the during-reading techniques, re-reading for better comprehension can be mentioned. And filling out forms and charts can be referred to as an after-reading activity. These tasks and ideas can be used to enhance reading comprehension. Text characteristics Good readers expect to understand what they are reading. Therefore, texts should contain words and grammatical structures familiar to the learners (Van Duzer, 1999). In texts where vocabulary is not familiar, teachers can introduce key vocabulary in pre-reading activities that focus on language awareness, such as finding synonyms, antonyms, derivatives, or associated words (Hood et al., 1996; cited in Van Duzer, 1999). The topics of texts chosen should be in accordance with the age range, interests, sex, and background culture of the students for whom they are intended. Prereading activities that introduce the text should encourage learners to use their background knowledge (Eskey, 1997; cited in Van Duzer, 1999). Class members can brainstorm ideas about the meaning of a title or an illustration and discuss what they know. Pre-reading tips Before the actual act of reading a text begins, some points should be regarded in order to make the process of reading more comprehensible. It is necessary to provide the necessary background information to the reader to facilitate comprehension. In addition, as stated by Lebauer (1998), prereading activities can lighten students' cognitive burden while reading because prior discussions will have been incorporated. 

Teacher-directed pre-reading (Estes, 1999) Some key vocabulary and ideas in the text are explained. In this approach the teacher directly explains the information the students will need, including key concepts, important vocabulary, and appropriate conceptual framework.

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Interactive approach (Estes, 1999) In this method, the teacher leads a discussion in which he/she draws out the information students already have and interjects additional information deemed necessary to an understanding of the text

to be read. Moreover, the teacher can make explicit links between prior knowledge and important information in the text. 

Purpose of reading It is also necessary for students to become aware of the purpose and goal for reading a certain piece of written material. At the beginning stages this can be done by the teacher, but as the reader becomes more mature this purpose, i.e. awareness-raising strategy, can be left to the readers. For instance, the students may be guided to ask themselves, "Why am I reading this text? What do I want to know or do after reading?" One of the most obvious, but unnoticed, points related to reading purpose is the consideration of the different types of reading skills.

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Skimming: Reading rapidly for the main points

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Scanning: Reading rapidly to find a specific piece of information

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Extensive reading: Reading a longer text, often for pleasure with emphasis on overall meaning

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Intensive reading: Reading a short text for detailed information The most frequently encountered reason as to why the four skills are all subsumed into one – intensive reading – is that students studying a foreign language feel the urge to look up every word they don't understand and to pinpoint on every structural point they see unfamiliar. To make students aware of the different types of reading, ask them about the types of reading they do in their first language.

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The type of text The reader must become familiar with the fact that texts may take on different forms and hold certain pieces of information in different places. Thus, it is necessary to understand the layout of the material being read in order to focus more deeply on the parts that are more densely compacted with information. Even paying attention to the year of publication of a text, if applicable, may aid the reader in presuppositions about the text as can glancing at the name of the author.

Steinhofer (1996) stated that the tips mentioned in pre-reading will not take a very long time to carry out. The purpose is to overcome the common urge to start reading a text closely right away from the beginning. During-reading tips What follows are tips that encourage active reading. They consist of summarizing, reacting, questioning, arguing, evaluating, and placing a text within one's own experience. These processes may be the most complex to develop in a classroom setting, the reason being that in English reading classes most attention is often paid to dictionaries, the text, and the teacher. Interrupting this routine and encouraging students to dialogue with what they are reading without coming between them and the text presents a challenge to the EFL teacher. Duke and Pearson (2001) have stated that good

readers are active readers. According to Ur (1996), Vaezi (2001), and Fitzgerald (1995), they use the following strategies. 

Making predictions: The readers should be taught to be on the watch to predict what is going to happen next in the text to be able to integrate and combine what has come with what is to come.

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Making selections: Readers who are more proficient read selectively, continually making decisions about their reading.

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Integrating prior knowledge: The schemata that have been activated in the pre-reading section should be called upon to facilitate comprehension.

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Skipping insignificant parts: A good reader will concentrate on significant pieces of information while skipping insignificant pieces.

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Re-reading: Readers should be encouraged to become sensitive to the effect of reading on their comprehension.

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Making use of context or guessing: Readers should not be encouraged to define and understand every single unknown word in a text. Instead they should learn to make use of context to guess the meaning of unknown words.

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Breaking words into their component parts: To keep the process of comprehension ongoing, efficient readers break words into their affixes or bases. These parts can help readers guess the meaning of a word.

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Reading in chunks: To ensure reading speed, readers should get used to reading groups of words together. This act will also enhance comprehension by focusing on groups of meaningconveying symbols simultaneously.

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Pausing: Good readers will pause at certain places while reading a text to absorb and internalize the material being read and sort out information.

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Paraphrasing: While reading texts it may be necessary to paraphrase and interpret texts subvocally in order to verify what was comprehended.

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Monitoring: Good readers monitor their understanding to evaluate whether the text, or the reading of it, is meeting their goals.

After-reading tips It is necessary to state that post-reading activities almost always depend on the purpose of reading and the type of information extracted from the text. Barnett (1988) has stated that post-reading exercises first check students' comprehension and then lead students to a deeper analysis of the text. In the real world the purpose of reading is not to memorize an author's point of view or to summarize text content, but rather to see into another mind, or to mesh new information into what one already knows. Group discussion will help students focus on information they did not comprehend, or did comprehend correctly. Accordingly, attention will be focused on processes that

lead to comprehension or miscomprehension. Generally speaking, post-reading can take the form of various activities as presented below: 

Discussing the text: Written/Oral

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Summarizing: Written/Oral

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Making questions: Written/Oral

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Answering questions: Written/Oral

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Filling in forms and charts

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Writing reading logs

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Completing a text

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Listening to or reading other related materials

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Role-playing

This article published: 29th March, 2006 was first published in Iranian Language Institute Language Teaching Journal Volume 1, No.1 Spring 2005.

Further reading Barnett, M. A. (1988). Teaching reading in a foreign language. ERIC Digest Block, E. L. (1992). See how they read: comprehension monitoring of L1 and L2 readers. TESOL Quarterly 26(2) Dole, J. A. Duffy, G. G., Roehler, L. R., and Pearson, D. D. (1991). Moving from the old to the new: research on reading comprehension instruction. Review of Educational Research 61 Dubin, F., and Bycina, D. (1991). Models of the process of reading. In Celce-Murcia (ed.), Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language. Boston, Mass.: Heinle and Heinle. Duke, N. K., and Pearson, D. P. (n.d.). Effective practices for developing reading comprehension. Available at //effective reading.com/ (Oct. 15, 2001). Estes T. H. (1999). Strategies for reading to learn. Available at www.reading strategies. Fitzgerald, J. (1995). English-as-a-second-language learners' cognitive reading processes: a review of research in the United States. Review of Educational Research 65 Klein, M. L., Peterson, S., and Simington, L. (1991). Teaching Reading in the Elementary Grades. Needham Heights, Mass.: Allyn and Bacon. Lebauer, R. (1998). Lessons from the rock on the role of reading. Available at // langue.Hyper.Chubu.ac.jp/jalt/pub/t/t/98/lebauer.html McCarthy, C. P. (n. d.) Reading theory as a microcosm of the four skills. Applied Linguistics Series. Nunan, D. (1991). Language Teaching Methodology. Hertfordshire: Prentice Hall International. Paran, A. (1996). Reading in EFL: facts and fiction. ELT Journal 50 Rumelhart, D. E. (1977). Toward an interactive model of reading. In S. Dornic (ed.), Attention and Performance IV. New York, NY: Academic Press.

Steinhofer, H. (1996). How to read nonfictional English texts faster and more effectively. The Internet TESL Journal, Vol. II, No. 6, June 1996 Ur, P. (1996). A Course in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vaezi, S. (2001). Metacognitive reading strategies across language and techniques. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Allameh Tabataba'i University, Tehran, Iran. Van Duzer, C. (1999). Reading and the Adult English Language Learner. Washington, D.C.: Clearinghouse for ESL Literacy Education Shahin Vaezi Ph.D. Assistant professor, University of Science and Technology, Iran

Exploring Second Language Reading Why do some English language learners hate to read? How can teachers keep their ESL students motivated? Try a bottom-up instead of a top-down approach. Some second language learners dislike reading because they are afraid of failure or lack confidence. Others hate L2 reading because they read too slowly. How can teachers deal with these issues and make L2 reading easier for learners? Good readers are fast readers

If you want to run a race, you need to practice. The same is true of reading. Learners who read more often will get better at reading, and subsequently improve their skills, increasing their reading rate. Not all fast readers are good readers, but research does indicate that learners who read at a slow rate tend to dislike reading. It's a question of exposure

Yes and no. The more we are exposed to something, the better we get at it, and reading in another language is no different. However, current research in ESL/EFL suggests that not all learners can become proficient readers based on exposure alone. Teachers must find strategies to help improve learners’ reading skills.

A brief history of L2 reading trends

Thirty years ago, reading was all about meaning: top down skills. Teachers were encouraged to activate a learner’s prior knowledge in order to build schemata from which learners could form ideas around, thus increasing comprehension. Nowadays, however, there has been a shift to focus more on learners’ bottom-up skills, and assure literal comprehension of the text first. The Top-down Approach

This approach focuses on “meaningful” learning. Reading becomes a dialog between the text and reader. It relies on Schema Theory, which, briefly, says that a reader’s experience and background knowledge is essential for understanding a text. Types of reading activities that focus on this approach are:  

predicting the text using titles, pictures writing a journal entry about a time the learner had a similar experience

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expressing an opinion or reaction to the text

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writing a summary of the text or of the author’s point of view

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taking notes in the margin of the main ideas of each paragraph

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relating the text to something in current events

The Bottom-up Approach This approach focuses on the smaller units of language that help us decode a message: word and structure recognition, the sound-letter relationship, making meaning of syntactic units (phrases and

sentences). The argument is that, without a literal or fundamental understanding of the language, no top-down processing can occur. Improving bottom-up skills can create faster readers, as learners improve their sight-word recognition. Examples of reading activities that exhibit this approach are: 

finding or underlining examples of tenses (e.g. future, past) or grammar structures (e.g. prepositions of place, conditional sentences)

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scanning a text for specific information (e.g. someone’s age, the population of a country)

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making a timeline of the events in the text

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finding synonyms or definitions for words in bold

An interactive approach Although many teachers often favor one approach over the other, it can be argued that both have their place in the language classroom. In fact, the two approaches tend to be compensatory – learners weak in a bottom-up approach compensate by using top-down skills, and vice versa. The two approaches also influence one another – if bottom-up skills are ignored, there is the risk of misunderstanding the basic meaning from which top-down skills are built. On the other hand, if top-down skills are ignored, learners become passive readers, and do not develop the analytical skills important to good readers. As with most things in teaching, it is necessary to create a balance between the two. 

Top-down and bottom-up design

In 'real-life' listening, our students will have to use a combination of the two processes, with more emphasis on 'top-down' or 'bottom-up' listening depending on their reasons for listening.

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Top-down vs. bottom-up listening

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In the classroom

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Top-down listening activities

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Bottom-up listening activities

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Conclusion Top-down vs. bottom-up listening Imagine the following situations: 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. How do you listen in each case? Are there any differences? With the holiday anecdote, your main concern was probably understanding the general idea and knowing when some response was expected. In contrast, when listening to the directions to a party, understanding the exact words is likely to be more important – if you want to get there without incident, that is! The way you listened to the holiday anecdote could be characterised as top-down listening. This refers to the use of background knowledge in understanding the meaning of the message. Background knowledge consists of context, that is, the situation and topic, and co-text, in other words, what came before and after. The context of chatting to a friend in a casual environment itself narrows down the range of possible topics. Once the topic of a holiday has been established, our knowledge of the kind of things that can happen on holiday comes into play and helps us to ‘match’ the incoming sound signal against our expectations of what we might hear and to fill out specific details. In contrast, when listening to directions to a friend’s house, comprehension is achieved by dividing and decoding the sound signal bit by bit. The ability to separate the stream of speech into individual words becomes more important here, if we are to recognise, for example, the name of a street or an instruction to take a particular bus. In reality, fluent listening normally depends on the use of both processes operating simultaneously. Think about talking to your friends (in your first language) in a noisy bar. It is likely that you ‘guess’ the content of large sections of the conversation, based on your knowledge of the topic and what has already been said. In this way, you rely more on top-down processing to make up for unreliability in the sound signal, which forms an obstacle to bottom-up processing. Similarly, second-language listeners often revert to their knowledge of the topic and situation when faced with unfamiliar vocabulary or structures, so using top-down processing to compensate for difficulties in bottom-up processing. On the other hand, if a listener is unable to understand anything of what she hears, she will not even be able to establish the topic of conversation, so top-down processing will also be very limited.

In the classroom In real-life listening, our students will have to use a combination of the two processes, with more emphasis on top-down or bottom-up listening depending on their reasons for listening. However, the two types of listening can also be practised separately, as the skills involved are quite different. Top-down listening activities Do you ever get your students to predict the content of a listening activity beforehand, maybe using information about the topic or situation, pictures, or key words? If so, you are already helping them to develop their top-down processing skills, by encouraging them to use their knowledge of the topic to help them understand the content. This is an essential skill given that, in a real-life listening situation, even advanced learners are likely to come across some unknown vocabulary. By using their knowledge of context and co-text, they should either be able to guess the meaning of the unknown word, or understand the general idea without getting distracted by it. Other examples of common top-down listening activities include putting a series of pictures or sequence of events in order, listening to conversations and identifying where they take place, reading information about a topic then listening to find whether or not the same points are mentioned, or inferring the relationships between the people involved. Bottom-up listening activities The emphasis in EFL listening materials in recent years has been on developing top-down listening processes. There are good reasons for this given that learners need to be able to listen effectively even when faced with unfamiliar vocabulary or structures. However, if the learner understands very few words from the incoming signal, even knowledge about the context may not be sufficient for her to understand what is happening, and she can easily get lost. Of course, low-level learners may simply not have enough vocabulary or knowledge of the language yet, but most teachers will be familiar with the situation in which higher-level students fail to recognise known words in the stream of fast connected speech. Bottom-up listening activities can help learners to understand enough linguistic elements of what they hear to then be able to use their top-down skills to fill in the gaps. The following procedure for developing bottom-up listening skills draws on dictogloss, and is designed to help learners recognise the divisions between words, an important bottom-up listening skill. The teacher reads out a number of sentences, and asks learners to write down how many words there would be in the written form. While the task might sound easy, for learners the weak forms in normal connected speech can make it problematic, so it is very important for the teacher to say the sentences in a very natural way, rather than dictating them word-by-word. Some suitable sentences are: 

I’m going to the shop.

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Do you want some chocolate?

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Let’s have a party!

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I’d better go soon.

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You shouldn’t have told him.

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What are you doing?

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There isn’t any coffee.

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What have you got?

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He doesn’t like it.

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It’s quite a long way.

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Why did you think you’d be able to?

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Can you tell him I called?

Learners can be asked to compare their answers in pairs, before listening again to check. While listening a third time, they could write what they hear, before reconstructing the complete sentences in pairs or groups. By comparing their version with the correct sentences, learners will become more aware of the sounds of normal spoken English, and how this is different from the written or carefully spoken form. This will help them to develop the skill of recognising known words and identifying word divisions in fast connected speech. Conclusion Successful listening depends on the ability to combine these two types of processing. Activities which work on each strategy separately should help students to combine top-down and bottom-up processes to become more effective listeners in real-life situations or longer classroom listenings. Further reading Anne Anderson and Tony Lynch (1988). Listening. Oxford University Press Jack Richards, Designing instructional materials for teaching listening comprehension, in ‘The Language Teaching Matrix’, Cambridge, 1990 Mary Underwood (1989). Teaching Listening. Longman Penny Ur (1984), Teaching Listening Comprehension, Cambridge. Magnus Wilson. Discovery Listening – improving perceptual processing. ELT Journal Volume 57/4 (October 2003). Catherine Morley, Teacher, Teacher trainer, Mexico

Teaching Listening : Top Down or Bottom Up?

In a previous article, I made a distinction between teaching listening and practising listening. Practising listening is just a matter of giving students constant and frequent exposure to the language, and presumes that this will gradually increase their familiarity with its sounds, rhythm, intonation etc, allowing easier decoding. An approach aimed at teaching listening, on the other hand, starts from the premise that the students’ comprehension is blocked by specific features of the language or listening process, and that in our lessons we can focus on those features one at a time and improve the students’ ability to deal with them. We looked in detail at what some of those features might be in the article Why Don’t They Understand? If we are teaching, rather than just practising listening, the focus on these features will form the objectives of our listening lesson. In recent years there have been two major approaches to explaining the listening process – rather unfortunately called the topdown and bottom-up approaches. The bottom-up approach sees comprehension as a matter of listeners first decoding (or understanding) the smallest elements of what they hear – the sounds. /p/ is recognised as being /p/ and not /b/, /i:/ as being /i:/ and not /i/ or /e/ and so on. These sounds are then combined and the individual words are decoded – the listener recognises that s/he has heard /pi:t/ and not /pit/ /bit/ /bi:t/ /bi:d/ or some other word. The words are then combined into sentences and the listener works out the meaning of /pi:t/ : as in I saw Pete yesterdayor I bought some peat for the garden. To this will be added recognition of features such as intonation and so on, until we finally reach the non-linguistic context. The top-down approach starts from the opposite end : it sees understanding as starting from the listener’s background knowledge of the non-linguistic context and of working down towards the individual sounds. Listeners will actively interpret what they hear in terms of their understanding of the situation and the world in general. For example, imagine I tell you : McKenzy brought me another present today. It was too late to save it so I buried it in the garden. I think I’m going to have to put a bell round his neck.

You will certainly understand all the words in this passage, but do you understand the meaning? Think back to what happened as you read. The first sentence probably went quite smoothly. But there was more than just decoding of words going on. Without your even being aware of it, subconscious expectations were forming in your mind based on your knowledge of the world – McKenzy is probably a friend, probably a man as only the surname is used, the present will be something nice etc. The existence of these presuppositions is shown by the fact that you probably did a double-take when you got to the second sentence – buried it? Eh?? And at that point you will have started to search quite consciously for the meaning. Maybe by the end you’d worked it out. If so, then notice that it was your knowledge of the world which helped you understand – not what’s in the text. Or maybe you’re still in the dark. I can help you by giving you some contextual or situational knowledge : McKenzy is the name of my cat. Combine that with your knowledge of the world (the habit cats have of bringing their owners “presents” of half dead birds and mice which they’ve caught, and the fact that the noise of a bell will prevent the cat from creeping up on them unheard) and you have the meaning of the passage. However much help you did or didn’t need, you can see that in understanding the passage a lot more was going on than just passively decoding the sounds (or in this case letters, as you were reading it - but the principle is the same) then the words, then the sentences. Your mind was working actively to interpret the passage, and using a large amount of non-textual information to do so. And how easy it was will depend on how close to the forefront of your mind that information was. If, as you read the passage, your cat was sitting on your lap, you probably tuned in immediately. If you have never owned a cat, it may have taken longer. In recent years it has been the chief approach to listening comprehension in the EFL classroom, and has led to teachers telling students things such as You don’t need to understand every word, What would you expect him to say? or Try and identify the main ideas and guess the rest. I’m not trying to suggest that this is not a valid approach. It is. The switch to a top-down approach was a necessary change from the exaggerated bottom-up approach which in some cases remained current in foreign language teaching as late as the 1960s. In this approach, the learner’s listening ability was seen as being evidenced by his or her ability to take down a dictated paragraph in exactly the same form as it was read out, or to answer detailed comprehension questions on a written passage read by the teacher. With no exposure to the natural features of spoken language, and with no training in the type of listening strategies emphasised in the top-down approach, it was little wonder that even supposedly advanced level students returned from their first trip to Britain, the States etc saying I didn’t understand a word anyone said! Since the mid-20th century, things have changed. The advent of the tape recorder meant that recorded dialogues could be used in the classroom for the first time. Research into the spoken language and the invention of video as well as audio tape led to the use of authentic and semi-authentic materials which incorporated the type of features of the spoken language which I focused on in Why Don’t They Understand? And finally, research into the listening process itself led to our recognition of the importance of top-down processing. But have we gone too far? Students still come back from their trips saying I didn’t understand a word and still frequently hate doing listening comprehension in the classroom. However often the teacher says If you’ve been able to answer the questions then you’ve understood the text, they don’t really believe it. They know there were chunks that they were unable to decode, and feel insecure – in the worst case scenario losing confidence in the teacher or the course. Why is this happening? I would suggest that for a while we went too far over to the other extreme, and have often forgotten that, even if they start from the top, students still need to get to the bottom. Listening lessons have tended to stop half-way. We help students apply knowledge of the world and contextual knowledge to the text. We encourage them to focus on what they do understand rather than what they don’t by teaching them to focus on key words and infer connections. All this is valid and necessary. But what about the rest? I would argue that if we are going to help students improve their comprehension, we do need to focus on what they don’t understand. For example, if the item that blocked comprehension was a weak form we need to help them analyse the pronunciation features so that they will be more ready for it the next time. For while it is true that native speakers don’t “hear” every word either, there’s a difference. If, as a native speaker I hear a sequence of sounds something like umgernaseeyimlader oreelerbinsurprised, I have no trouble decoding those sentences as I’m going to see him later and He’ll have been surprised, even though I can’t be said, for example, to have heard the words to, will or have – they simply weren’t there. But as a native speaker I have a non-conscious knowledge of both the phonological features and the grammar of the language. The first, for example, means that I expect him to be pronounced /im/, and know that if /im/ is preceeded by a vowel, the linking consonant /j/ will be inserted. So when I hear what is apparently “yim”, I have no problem decoding it as him. Decoding “er” (the schwa sound) as have is also a matter of knowing that have is often pronounced like this in a unstressed position, but it is also helped by my knowledge of grammar : I know that if I’ve decoded will and been, then have must be in the middle, whether I hear it or not. Non-consciously then, my native-speaker brain is working actively to interpret the sounds and to give them a meaning. It’s a bit like the picture above. What do you see? A face? Rubbish – it’s just two circles, a straight line and a curved line. Totally unconnected. But your brain puts them together and tries to make sense of them. Because it’s seen a lot of faces and knows that they have to have those elements, that’s what it sees. It’s the same with listening - the words don't have to "be there" for the competent listener to "hear" them. The problem for our learners of course is that they don’t have native speaker competence and therefore their brains can’t “fill in the gaps” like this. Which is why, using the top-down approach, we need to help them develop other listening strategies to the full, to help them to compensate. However, by also taking a bottom-up approach, I think we can help them improve their ability to decode sounds , words and phrases

I’ll exemplify this in the next article in this series by looking at a possible structure for a listening lesson which incorporates both approaches. It starts with a top-down approach, but then moves on to activities aimed at improving students ability to decode sounds, words and phrases “bottom-up”.

Developing Bottom-Up Decoding Skills for Listening In the article Planning a Listening Lesson, I argued that listening involved both top-down and bottom-up (1) processing working simultaneously, and that we needed to focus on both when teaching listening. But given that, the lesson illustrated in the article remained decidedly top-heavy on the top-down side. Is there a place for greater focus on bottom-down processing skills? First of all, what are bottom-up decoding skills? In the previous article I glossed bottom-up decoding as meaning moving from recognition of individual sounds to recognition of the meaning of whole utterances. Here’s a more detailed (though by no means complete) list. · Recognising individual phonemes · Recognising phoneme sequences which form words · Recognising word boundaries · Recognising stressed syllables · Recognising intonation contours · Recognising syllable reduction due to weak forms and/or elision · Recognising catenation · Recognising assimilation (2) and so on. As you can see, they tend to be phonological (3), and I would argue that it is in focusing systematically on phonology during the course that we can best teach bottom-up processing skills. InPlanning a Listening Lesson I suggested that a focus can, and should, be built into the listening lesson – but it will inevitably remain non-systematic, dependent on what “comes up” in the listening texts chosen. We also need a more systematic approach, based on our knowledge of the difficulties our learners have, which will be largely dependent on the differences between the phonological system of English and that of their first language (L1). For example, Arabic speakers will need to work on the distinction between /p/ and /b/, Finns will have difficulty with /g/ and /k/, Germans will tend to pronounce a final /d/ as /t/ or /v/ as /w/ and so on. Problems will also arise with stress and intonation

– e.g. Italians will have difficulty recognising the meaning of contrastive stress. (4) In teaching phonology, we need of course to deal with both receptive and productive aspects. Students need to reach a productive phonological level of at least intelligibility. But I am here concerned only with receptive aspects – whether they are able to recognise these features when listening, and therefore fully understand what is being said. Once we know what our learners problems are liable to be, we can then look at our syllabus and analyse which items which we are teaching will bring up those problems. And a phonological focus can then be built into the lessons presenting, practising and recycling those items, or in some cases planned as an independent section of the lesson. How might you integrate a receptive phonological focus into the lesson? Here’s one example, based on a problem encountered by Italian beginner students – distinguishing between numbers such asthirteen – thirty - fourteen – forty etc. The problem occurs firstly because of difficulty distinguishing between the –teen and –ty pairs and, at beginners level is often due to a failure to recognise differing stress patterns- thirTEEN versus THIRty, differing vowel length and the final consonant in the “teens”. However, the problem is made worse by the fact that there is also confusion betweenthirteen/fourteen and thirty/forty. Italians tend to hear both initial consonants as /f/ and do not distinguish between the two vowel sounds. Therefore, an Italian hearing thirteen may equally well interpret it as thirty, fourteen or forty. While numbers are being taught we therefore need to focus on these problems. For individual sounds, one technique that can be used is minimal pairs : students are asked to distinguish between two words which differ only in the target sounds – for instance, free and three. The words are listed in two columns on the board : column A has all the words with one sound - free, Finn, Fred, fort, roof – and column B those with the others – three, thin, thread, thought, Ruth. The teacher then says one word and the students have to decide if it comes from column A or B. If you want to take the activity on to the productive level, the roles are then reversed – a student says a word and the teacher identifies it. The problem with minimal pair work is that it is often difficult to find pairs which are known to beginners, or even useful to them, and if less common words are used the lesson tends to degenerate into a long explanation of the meanings of fug and thug and so on. An alternative is therefore to use a list of words which contain the problem sound, and which the students already know or which are easily illustrated: think – thing – three – thin – thank – bath – thumb etc. The teacher says each word in turn, sometimes pronouncing them correctly and at other times substituting the problem sound - “fank”, for example. The students listen and say if each word is correct or incorrect. To go back to our number problem, the minimal pair technique can also be used to focus on the stress difference in the complete number. The –teen numbers are put in column A and the –tynumbers in column B. The teacher again reads out one of each pair and the students identify the correct column. This can later be extended to four columns, A – thirteen B - thirty C – fourteen D –forty, asking the students to make the full distinctions using stress and phonemic cues simultaneously. Further practice can be given with the target words incorporated into sentences. The students have a worksheet with multiple choice answers : A : What’s the time? B : It’s ten 13 / 30 / 14 / 40 A : What’s your address ? B : It’s 13 / 30 / 14 / 40 London Road. Or alternatively a gap : A : How much is this CD? B : It’s ………………………… Euro. A : How old are you David? B : I’m ………………………….

The teacher then reads out the sentences with the missing numbers (40, 13, 30, 14 respectively) and the students listen and tick or write them down. This last activity is, to all extents and purposes a targeted dictation. Traditional dictation went out of vogue for some time after the development of the communicative approach, and when it was brought back (5) tended to be top-down rather than bottom-up as in the traditional variety. However, bottom-up dictations can be useful when they are targeted to help students with one specific decoding problem – as here. Minimal pair work and targeted dictations can be used with other phonological decoding problems – for example weak forms. Just two examples : a) again at beginner level, students may have difficulty recognising the the difference between is andwas, especially if the preceding pronoun is also weakened. Sentences like ……………… in Rome for three days; ………………… my best friend ; ……………………… very tired can be used, with the teacher saying at random he is or he was. b) at a higher level, the same thing can be done to help students hear the weak form of have in sentences like She should have put it away. The activity uses various sentences which may be either she modal + infinitive or she modal + have done : She should / should have put it away; It must /must have hurt a lot; She should /should have let me know; You should/ should have run home; They couldn’t /couldn’t have cut it up smaller; They can’t /can’t have shut the gate; They should/should have split the profits; It must /must have upset you. For other features, different techniques are necessary. For contrastive stress, students can be asked to listen to a sentence and then choose the implied meaning. The sentence might be John can’t do it now and the choices a) … but he can do it later b) but Mary can. The correct answer will depend on whether the stressed word was John or now. But what about traditional dictations where the teacher reads a passage and the students write it down? This can be useful as an occasional activity, if it’s used to revise some of the features which have previously been targeted individually. I generally use a short paragraph or dialogue which the students have already worked on earlier in the course and use a technique very similar to the one I described in Planning the Listening Lesson : 

Start by reading the whole text all while the students simply listen.

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Read the text phrase by phrase keeping to a natural speed, rhythm etc. Continue reading each phrase while the students write, until you see everyone has finished. If there are clearly problems, slow the phrase down and clarify the pronunciation until they get it, and then speed up again so that they have the chance to hear the naturally pronounced phrase again.

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By the end they should have an accurate version of the text (disregarding spelling problems, which are not a primary objective here). However, if you have a very large class it may be difficult to be sure of this. In this case let them compare their version with a partner, asking them to underline anything which is different. Then reread the passage so they can check which was the correct version.

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At the end, let them look back at the original text in their books and make any final corrections, including spelling. Some textbooks, for example Intermediate Express (6), do attempt to build in a systematic phonological focus into the course. However, textbooks have the disadvantage of being aimed at a very wide target audience. They will inevitably focus on the most widely experienced problems, but will tend to ignore those which are specific to only one or two language groups. They also only have time to focus on something once – whereas if it is a particular problem for the learners, it will need to be recycled regularly. It is only the teacher who can decide what the specific problems of his/her students are and ensure that activities are built in systematically to deal with them. Notes 1. For an explanation of both these terms, see the article Teaching Listening : Top Down or Bottom Up?

2. For an explanation of all these terms, see the article Why Don't They Understand? 3. For an alternative list and references to follow up, see the site of the publishing company Abax 4. The site English Language Learning and Teaching contains an excellent summary of the phonological problems of many major language groups. 5. Davis and Rinvolucri Dictation : New Methods New Possibilities (CUP) 6. International Express (various levels) OUP