Ronda and Derek Part 2

Listening- Encourage use of top-down and bottom-up strategies.

Students can and should look at language from these two angles to decipher the meaning of an utterance. Top-down is approaching the utterance from the big picture, it's entire meaning, using expectations, past experience, and schemata to understand the utterance and uncover the meaning of each piece and how they fit into the bigger picture. Bottom-up is the opposite: start with the smaller morphological and phonological parts of an utterance and build up from their meanings and roles to discover the big-picture meaning. Both approaches are equally important and are used on a case-by-case basis. This could be done by disecting utterances that include a word(s) students don't know (for top-down) or comprised of known words but unclear meaning of the utterance as a whole (for bottom-up).

Speaking- Encourage the development of speaking strategies.

Students gain skills that supplement oral communication towards automaticity. These include asking for clarification or something to be repeated for the listener to understand better, using fillers to buy time to process and paraphrasing or using nonverbal expressions when speaking, and even just asking the interlocutor for help. Language learners can benefit greatly by adopting and utilizing these techniques. Teachers can best explain them by modeling the strategies with a student(s) for the class and possibly creating a game or exercise (border-line drilling, but with partners) to follow the example.