Literature Review On The Effectiveness Of Teaching Bottom-up Listening Skills

Listening is a major challenge for many non-native English learners.In particular,many learners find it difficult to automatically process and segment the ongoing stream of sounds in the L2 speech due to various factors(e.g.,different sound systems,limited lexical resources,the ephemeral nature of listening).In current listening classes,listening is often tested instead of being taught on the grounds that outstanding performance in answering the given tests or tasks is the indicator of successful listening.Many teachers and practitioners overemphasize the product of listening,seldom shedding light on the processes that give rise to those products and pay little attention to students’ listening skill use.Students often develop slowly in their listening and their motivation and confidence are easily diminished.To help them improve their listening comprehension abilities,language learners need to learn to listen.There are two key aspects of listening,bottom-up and top-down processing.In current second language teaching,much attention was given to top-down listening abilities(e.g.prediction,inference,and use of contextual information),and the significant role of bottom-up listening skills(e.g.identifying various reduced/connected speech,word segmentation skills,using phonotactic cues)are often undervalued or even neglected.Motivated by this imbalance of top-down and bottomup in listening course design and void of evidence on the effectiveness of bottom-up listening skills in developing EFL/ESL learners’ listening comprehension,this study was conducted to examine the value of bottom-up skills in the enhancement of language learners’ listening ability.To achieve this outcome,the author conducted a review of the effectiveness of bottom-up instruction studies.The author also included in this review,a small-scale meta-analysis of some of the studies.After manual search and a snowball sampling process,26 studies centering on bottom-up listening skills were obtained.Each study was thoroughly examined and summarized especially on participants,participants’ proficiency level,number of participants,area of instruction and main results.The author categorized these studies into experimental studies(N=24)and qualitative studies(N=2).Bottom-up skills examined in this study included connected speech,and phonetic,morphological,lexical,and word segmentation skills.Results indicated that bottom-up listening skills are useful to teach.This is pedagogically significant considering that bottom-up listening skills are often neglected.It is suggested that current language listening teaching should consciously focus on learners’ bottom-up listening skills training,as a good command of such skills can contribute to their comprehensive listening.The study concluded that bottom-up related listening activities should be included in listening courses.By improving these basic skills,listeners can understand the actual content of the real time listening input,free up more working memory for top-down processing,and maximize their global listening as a consequence.