The Top Down Skills

Top down processing refers to the attribution of meaning, drawn from one's own world knowledge, to language input It involves "the listener's ability to bring prior information to bear on the task of understanding the "heard" language". (Morley 2001)

A List of Top Down 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):

  • discriminating between emotions
  • getting the gist
  • recognizing the topic
  • using discourse structure to enhance listening strategies
  • identifying the speaker
  • evaluating themes
  • finding the main idea
  • finding supporting details
  • making inferences
  • understanding organizing principals of extended speech

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