Bottom-Up Listening Skills

The Bottom Up Skills

Bottom up skills are skills which help in decoding. "Bottom-up refers to that part of the aural comprehension process in which the understanding of the the "heard" language is worked out proceeding from sounds to words to grammatical relationships in lexical meanings" (Morley 2001)

A List of Bottom Up 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 intonation contours in sentences
discriminating between phonemes
listening for word endings
recognizing syllable patterns
being aware of sentence fillers in informal speech
recognizing words, discriminate between word boundaries
picking out details
differentiating between content and function words by stress pattern
finding the stressed syllable
recognizing words with weak or central vowels
recognizing when syllables or words are dropped
recognizing words when they are linked together in streams of speech
using features of stress, intonation and prominence to help identify important information

back