Example of using top down and bottom up reading activity năm 2024

Clio has taught education courses at the college level and has a Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction.

Top down reading asks students to focus on the meaning of what they are reading rather than on individual words or phrases. This lesson offers some activities that will help enhance your students' top down reading.

Are you trying to help your students improve their reading comprehension and their capacity to make meaning from the different texts they encounter? One way to do this is to spend some time on the top down approach to reading. Top down reading means taking prior knowledge into account when encountering a new text, so that a student's active schema related to a particular topic or theme helps them incorporate what they learn from their reading. Further, in top down reading, students focus more on the overall meaning of a text rather than on individual words or phrases.

To get students practicing top down reading, you probably want to incorporate different activities into your instruction. The activities in this lesson can be modified to meet the needs of students at different ages and reading levels as they work with a top down approach to reading.

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These top down reading activities are great for visual learners, who can benefit from using images or graphic organizers as they read.

Here, you will find top down reading activities well suited to learners who like to work with their hands and bodies.

Finally, these activities employ language as students work on top down reading strategies.

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As you plan your lesson, do you start with the small building blocks and then expanding? Or do you start with the big picture and break it down? These two approaches actually have names — ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ approaches. The terms have been borrowed from cognitive psychology, but derive originally from computer science, where they distinguish processes that are data-driven from those that are knowledge-driven.

Imagine two situations: listening to a friend telling a story about last weekend and reading a recipe where you read the ingredients first. How do you listen or read in each case? Are there any differences? In the situation with a friend, you understand the general idea first, in contrast, when reading a recipe understanding the exact words is likely to be more important. The way you listened to the story could be characterised as ‘top-down’ approach. The second comprehension is achieved by dividing and decoding the parts — ‘bottom-up’.

‘Bottom-up’ processing

Vandergrift states that listeners or readers use BUP “when they use linguistic knowledge to understand the meaning of a message. They build meaning from lower level sounds to words to grammatical relationships to lexical meaning in order to arrive at the final message”.

Bottom up teaching starts with small details, like vocabulary words or grammar structures. As students have learnt them, the teacher broadens the scope of the lesson to include a reading or listening passage.

Bottom-up reading strategies begin with letter-sound correspondences (the bottom) to achieve comprehension (the top), starting with letters and sounds, building to morpheme and word recognition, and then gradually moving to grammatical structure identification, sentences, and longer texts. A phonics approach to teaching reading supports bottom-up processes.

‘Top-down’ processing

Top-down Processing (TDP), in contrast with BUP, is holistic, “going from whole to part, and focused on interpretation of meaning rather than recognition of sounds, words and sentences. Listeners actively formulate hypotheses as to speaker’s meaning, and confirm or modify them where necessary”.

Top-down strategies instruction focuses on activities that construct meaning, which students generate by employing background knowledge, making predictions, and searching the text to confirm or reject the predictions that are made. Other examples of common top-down listening / reading activities include putting a series of pictures or sequence of events in order, listening / reading 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.

During top-down processing of a word, students use their lexical knowledge to identify the incoming word as they connect the word to their knowledge of other related words and concepts. Students learn to recognise the words rather than read them letter by letter or syllabus by syllabus.

More teaching tips here:

Top down processing

Bottom up processing

What to choose?

Top-down and bottom-up teaching methods have the same learning objectives but different ways of achieving them. Top-down teaching is concerned with motivating students to learn through direct interaction and immersion, and allowing them to find meaning in a subject by applying their own experiences. 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. 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.

Bottom-up teaching is more instructor-driven and focuses on decoding and simplifying each component through repetition and memorization. This approach is better with lower level students as students understand very few words from the incoming signal, even knowledge about the context may not be sufficient for them to understand what is happening, and they can easily get lost. Higher-level students also sometimes fail to recognise known words in the stream of fast connected speech or in the text on complicated topics, thus this approach might be beneficial.

Successful listening and reading 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 and readers in real-life situations.

What are top down reading activities?

Top-Down Reading ActivitiesThrough making predictions, readers are being asked to anticipate the content of the text which may include key concepts or answers to certain questions. This anticipation helps readers give some order to the content and recognize its significance.

What is an example of a top down activity?

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 ...

What are bottom up activities for reading?

Basically, bottom up reading involves looking at the individual components of a text in order to understand the text as a whole. These individual elements include: Letters (this includes recognizing letters and correctly applying phonics) Words (guessing the meaning of unfamiliar words based on context)

What are the example activities of bottom up approach?

Have a look below to know more..

Fill in the Missing Words. This is probably the most basic exercise for a traditional bottom-up approach to listening. ... .

Natural or Non-Natural. ... .

Additional Tip. ... .

Identification Exercises. ... .

Identifying Divisions. ... .

Word Count Exercises. ... .

Dictation. ... .

Naturalize It..