2。 Literature Review

2。1 Previous studies

With more importance attached to listening teaching, some scholars have been committed to studies and proposed some valuable views on the application of the two strategies。 What is in a wide acknowledgment and accept is that the use of combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches is a wise choice。 Take Nunan for instance, he stressed that teachers should adopt both of them in listening classrooms to develop students’ listening skills in his article in 1998。 Similar to Nunan, Peterson advocated that teachers ought to promote flexibility in the two strategies (Peterson 89), which would be of great help for students to improve their listening efficiently。 Cai Jie also concluded that the interaction of bottom-up and top-down processing strategies can influence students’ listening comprehension ability a lot (Cai Jie 25)。 However, many scholars, as well as many teachers overemphasize the interaction view of the two approaches, ignoring some other potential factors, especially listeners’ level, which can determine classroom instructing efficiency。 Thus, taking a Huai’an junior high school English listening teaching as an example, this paper is intended to focus on discussion on application of bottom-up processing and top-down processing to listening teaching from the perspective of students’ level。 To some degree, the thesis can make some contributions to listening teaching。 Students will be inclined to cope with the difficult points they encounter in listening comprehension from the their own level and are likely to enhance their confidence in learning English knowledge。 Teachers, on the other hand, can easily provide different kinds of strategy training activities for students with top-down processing and bottom-up processing based on the analysis of the level of listeners, which can bring about a striking effect on listening teaching in Huai’an junior high school listening teaching。

2。2 Theoretical basis

As mentioned above, the writer attempts to talk over the application of bottom-up and top-down processing strategies on the students’ level perspective。 So, the concept of teaching students according to their aptitude must be referred to in this part。 Every barber knows that students’ variable features and different proficiency level in learning English listening are related to a lot of objective and subjective elements, such as otherness of intelligence, difference of starting points, persification of cultural background, and the like。 Some researches probing into listening comprehension manifest that students with different proficiency level in their learning put their concern on variable approaches to processing information。 For example, McDonugh in 1995 made a summary that students with higher level tend to employ top-down processing, while the lower-level students prefer the bottom-up processing (McDonugh 151)。 Field’s research experiment in 2004 also showed that lower-level listeners would turn to bottom-up processing approach for decoding information instead of resorting to top-down processing strategy (Field 375)。 For the sake of effectiveness of listening lessons, teachers ought to pay enough attention to listeners’ level and take the principle of “teaching students in accordance with their aptitude” as the instruction point to induct students to express themselves with the appropriate processing strategies in listening teaching class。文献综述

2。3 The definition of bottom-up and top-down Processing

Different definitions of the two types of processing models has been entailed since they were proposed by Richards to explain the ways of listening comprehension。 Field and Carrier held the idea that bottom-up information originates from the written or aural input。 Listeners who are engaged in bottom-up processing will fix their attention on the listening material itself, and then extract the meaning of the content by decoding some segmented parts, including sounds, words, phrases and sentences, into complete informative texts in a linear way。 In contrast to bottom-up processing, top-down processing keeps a non-linear perspective and top-down information stems from a extended context or the learners’ background knowledge about the world。 With top-down processing, learners are likely to mobilize their background knowledge in their brains, either content schema or textual schema (Long 35) to have a prediction and judgment in advance, which contributes to their inferring the meaning that speakers want to express。