The ministry of higher and secondary specialised education of uzbekistan

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.
Bottom up listening
The ability to separate the stream of speech into individual words to recognize.


A List of Bottom Up Skills
(This list has been compiled from a number of sources: Peterson (1991), and Brown (2001). They are are listed in a rough order of conceptual difficulty):

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  discriminating between intonation contours in sentences
  
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  discriminating between phonemes
  
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  listening for word endings
  
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  recognizing syllable patterns
  
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  being aware of sentence fillers in informal speech
  
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  recognizing words, discriminate between word boundaries
  
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  picking out details
  
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  differentiating between content and function words by stress pattern
  
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  finding the stressed syllable
  
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  recognizing words with weak or central vowels
  
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  recognizing when syllables or words are dropped
  
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  recognizing words when they are linked together in streams of speech
  
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  using features of stress, intonation and prominence to help identify important information
  

A List of Top-Down Skills
By using their knowledge of context and co-text, students should either be able

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  to guess the meaning of the unknown word, or
  
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  understand the general idea without getting distracted by it,
  
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  putting a series of pictures or sequence of events in order,
  
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  listening to conversations and identifying where they take place,
  
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  reading information about a topic then listening to find whether or not the same points are mentioned, or
  
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  inferring the relationships between the people involved
  
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