Listening prehension
Since the 1980s, increasing attention has been placed on listening. Second language (L2) researchers view it as a coitive process and a key aspect of oral proficiency. Peterson (2001) explains that listening prehension is a ive process where listeners work on various levels of cognitive processing to understand the ining speech. Listening is generally viewed as involving an interaction between top-down and bottog.
Top-down processing, aording to Rost (2011), stands for the inforg guided by higher level struct representations by drawing on our experiences and expectations. Listeners tap into background knowledge of the topic, the situation or context, the type of text, and the language. This background knowledge activates a set of expectations that help the listeners to interpret what is heard and anticipate what will co (). In other words, listeners use top-down processes when they build a conceptual fraprehension by using their familiarity with the listening context and their prior knowledge (topic, genre, culture, and other schema knowledge). Listeners use content words and contextual clues to form hypotheses in an exploratory her hand, bottog, as described by Rost (2011), refers to the inforg that is guided by input in real tiial stages. Listeners use text-based strategies for cog on binations of sounds, words, and grammar (). In other words, listeners use bottom-up processes when they use their linguistic knowledge of sounds and word forplex lexical and grao interpret the input. Listeners use bottom-up processes when they construct retion, gradually bining increasingly larger units of meaning from the phoneme-level up to discourse-level features.
This view of listening as involving both top-down processing and bottoordance with second language theory, which views listening as an interactive and plex process in which listeners focus attention on selective aspects of oral input, construct e what they hear to existing knowledge. Listening prehension, then, is not just top-down or bottog, but is an interactive and interpretive process in which listeners use both linguistic knowledge and contextual knowledge to understand messages.