What's Bottom-Up processing? What's Top-Down processing?

What do you see in this picture?

It is the the picture of Rat Man of Bugelski and Alampay (1961). It is a good instruemtn to exlaining about Bottom-Up processing and Top-Down processing.

Let me take "perception" for example. If you perceive something from date in the outside world through your senses, it is called Bottom-Up processing. And if you perceive something, using your previous knowledge and expections, it is called Top-Down processing. It's because something abstract is considerd as "Top, while something concrete is considered as down.

That is, Top-Down processing occurs any time a higher-level concept influences your interpretation of lower level sensory data. If you see a lot of pictures of human faces before you see the picture above, you get to think that picture is a man wearing a glasses, on the other hand, if you see a lot of pictures of animals before you see the picture above, you come to think that picture is a mice.

This is a good example of Top-Down processing, because you previous knowledge influenced your perception.

What's four Models?

1. Model 1: Listening and Repeating.

There is no content involved in this model. As you already learned about ALM(AudioLingual Method), this model uses the same method as ALM. That is to say, it uses pattern drills, imitating what you just listened to and learning the listening meterial by heart. You may think that this model just makes you like a parrot, therefore this model is too outdated to use in this day and age, but you can readily find yourself studying English, using this model. So can I. I think this is basics for improving your listneing and furthermore your speaking ability.

2. Model 2: Listening and Answering.

On the contrary with Model 1, Model 2 has meaning involved. It is attribured to the fact that because you have to answer to a certain question, you are forced to focus on the listening material and try to find meaning in it. However, this model does not want any creative work on the part of a students because you don't have to creat an answer to a question. If you listen carefully, you can find the answer in the script. That is, this model is composed of factual questions and resultant factual answers. For this reason, Model 2 can also involve a little bit of patterns drills like Model 1.
For example,
a: Are you students?-
b: Yes, I am.

3. Model 3: Task Listening.

This is much more upgraded Model compared to Model 1 and Model 2. A student have to accomplish a task after listening. For your information, takes means "an activity where language is used for a communicative purpose by the learner in order to attain a real-world outcome." Therefore this method is also referred to as "Listen-and-do"method. In this vein, action can be involved to solve the task and students participation naturally occurs while they negotiate meaning. In addition, they use their cognitive thinking skills, they are not easily bored..

4. Model 4: Interactive Listening.

You are tempted to think that listening is far from interaction because listening takes place in one way. That is, in view of the fact that you only listen and never speake something, you may think listening is unilateral. However, listening can be interactive enough for some reason. communicate for real purpose. Whenever some reaction follows listening, interaction can happen. For example, when a students just finished his or her presentation, other students can raise a question over his or her presentation. And then, the presenter answers to the question. As is with the case, interaction happens. In this situation students can acquire three phases of the sppech act, such as speech decoding, critical thinking and speech encoding. Let me put it using more easier words. If you listen to something, you decode the speech. And then, you consider deeply the decoded speech and then you say somethig, whick is called speech encoding. This Model can be of a great influence on improving your interactive skills in English Listen.

What makes us difficult in listening English?

1. Let's say you have a conversation with an English speaking person and if you have litte background knowledge, or topic familiarity while talking, you may stand a high possibility of having difficulty in listening. That is, if you not that familiar with what's going on, you can lost interest in your conversation.

2. If you have poor Enlgish vocabularies and do not know much of English vocabularies, it would be very difficult to understand what an interlocutor say, even though you try to listen. It's because of the fact that you do not know enough words to understand a sentence. In other word, if you know lots of English vocabularies, you can grasp English sentence easily. This is the power of "vocabularies."

3. Even though you know a lot of English vocabularies, if the interlocutor speaks fast enough for you not to understand his or her words, you are just helpless. Therefore the interlocutor's speed of speaking could be one of the obstacles to understand a person's saying.

4. If you are trained to speak and listen to American style English, you will have a hard time in listening to British style English. Therefore you need to be prepared for both of American and British style English pronunciation. In realilty, I,호섭, more often than not study American style English, so when I have a chance to confront British style English, I have a tendancy to avoid it because it is not familiar with me, therefore it is so hard to understand.

5 If you do not know well about English sentence structure, it is difficult to understand English. Let's say someone said a sentend a little fast, so you miss a word like this example.
ex) Could you tell him to answer to my question to see ( ) the perpetrator was here or not.
If you are well-structured in terms of English sentence structure, you will readiliy know the answer. That is to say, "structure" could be an important element of Listening English.

6. If you do not have your own strategy to listening English, It will take a long time for you to easily listening to English. Your own way of doing somethig always make you cut the corner.

l7. You always try to enhance your English listening skills in a quiet place. That is, you listen to very clear and not obscure English in terms of pronuciation. However, it is not the case when you virtually use English. There could be lots of background noise and other unexpected situations. Therefore, your listeningenvironment should be like real-life. ack of exposure to actually listening environment,

8. Englsih havs various accents. Therefore you have to have a chance to be exposed to various English accents.



Listening and Repeating.

no content involved, just listening and repeating.



here meaning involved because you have to answer to questions.

you don't have to creat your answer. a little of drills

Are you students?-yes i am.





maybe action can be involved to solve a task. students participation, meaning negotiation involved. they use their cognitive thinking skills, they are not bored..



communicate for real purpose. add comments, exchange,

When we ask someone if he or she are good at English or is able to communicate with others in English, we always ask like this, "Can you speak English?" instead of "Can you understnad English?" or "Can you listen to Engish ?" or "Can you write English?" It is because if you want to communicate with others, using language, "speaking" is widely considered as the most fundamental and integral part of all four skills-speaking, listening, reading and writing. For this reason, speaking is regarded as tremendously important in SLA. At this important jucture where "speaking" is on the top of the list, a question comes across everyone's mind.

Korean students tend to hesitate speaking up in English in the classroom. This seems to be one of the critical barriers to developing communication skills in class. How can teacher help them open up their mouth with no tension or any pressure?

I think all of this came from a lack of opportunities for speaking Engish in public during students' school lives. Teacher should give them chances

The Korean Times..

Sometimes it seems as if the U.S nuclear negotiators are coping with two adversaries-North Korea and Washington hard liners..

Assistnat Secretary of State Christophr Hill returned from this three-day visit to North Korea Friday, managing to keep Pyongyang from restarting the Yongbyon plant for the time being if the ongoing stoppage of any related news from the North is any guide.

Based on various speculative reports, the U.S. envoy and his North Korean counterparts seem to have exchanged their respective compromise plans and are now weighing each other's proposals. Hill reportedly propoesd the separate verification scheme, in which the United States remains content with the inspection of Yongbyon plutonium plant plus some nuclear sampling, while unreported facilities, uranium plant, and programs, proliferation to Middle East countries, for sometime later..

Week II: Reading I- Phonics, Storybooks

Phonics refers to instructional method that allows teachers to teach children reading skills..It includes teaching children to connect the Alphabet with the English sound..Therefore, we can assume that there will be some kind of patterns between the English letters and their sounds. If there were exact correlation between the former and the latter, this method would be more efficient..However, that is not the case. My point is that there are too many sounds for the only 26 letters of Alphabet to represent in English. For example, no Alphabet makes sound for "/θ/ or /ð/"..Therefore, two Alphabet has to be combined -'t' and 'h'- for this. Like this, irregularities do exist and this makes children tired. Additionally, English includes the spelling patterns of five languages (Old English, Danish, Norman French, Classical Latin and Greek)..This means more exceptions do exits, which makes children more tired. However, until the Phonics emerged, had there been hardly a method using phonics, so it was valuable itself. Anyway, looking back on my middle school days when I first started to memorize English words, I think I benefited from Phonics. When I learned those words by heart at that time, I associated words with their sounds and then that helped me a lot.
As we already said above, There are words that do not follow phonics rules..They are often called "sight words" because they must be memorized by sight. Sight words do not have to be analyzed letter by letter. . This leas to reading a word on sight but not know the meaning of the word. Some say you should learn English by "chunks". That means that because sentences are compose of chunks, it is necessary for you not to pay too much attention to details. I think this is on the same page with sight word method..
Teachers who use phonics also often teach students to memorize the most high frequency words in English, such as it, he, them, and when, even though these words are fully decodable. The argument for teaching these "high frequency words" is that knowing them will improve students' reading fluency.
Basal readers are textbooks used to teach reading and associated skills to schoolchildren. Commonly called "reading books" or "readers" they are usually published as anthologies that combine previously published short stories, excerpts of longer narratives, and original works. A standard basal series comes with individual identical books for students, a Teacher's Edition of the book, and a collection of workbooks, assessments, and activities.
he highly pre-planned nature of basal readers is seen as one of their strengths, as this eases the load on teachers, particularly those who are inexperienced. Specific skills can be easily targeted, tested, and remediated. Those with very controlled vocabulary usage may ease difficulties for beginning or weak readers.Students who are reading below grade level will receive some benefits from using the on-level basal. The exposure will prepare them for state testing.
Some of the benefits of basal readers are viewed as shortcomings by critics of these books. Critics charge that they focus on teaching isolated skills, rather than fostering an enjoyment and appreciation of reading for its own sake, and that more time is spent on the supplemental worksheets than on actually reading authentic texts. The quality of the literature in the reading books is another target of criticism. Works chosen mainly to allow skills practice may not be particularly meaningful, authentic, or interesting.
Linguistic approach
The book tell us that this approach utilizes a scientific knowledge of language and exposes children to certain carefully selected words containing regular spelling patterns so that they can infer the letter-sound relationships in those words.
In this vein, I was once told that it is a great way to memorize English words that you try to study English words by synonyms or antonymy..I actually got a good results from this way..Therefore I think this approach is with merits..
Language Experience Approach
As the book says, LEA is on the premise that if the actual language and content of the stories is familiar to readers, they should be able to learn to read it even more easily.. I think this is really true in light of my experience.. I have read certain English news articles for several month on a daily basis. There was a time when I hesitated to which newspaper to read between the Korean Times and Herald tribune.. The latter was hard to understand because the articles are all about the U.S., therefore they were not familiar with me and the English itself was difficult. In stark contrast, the former was relatively easy to get the point, since it dealt with stories concerning Korea which I was familiar with.
According this book, this approach can be used very beginning readers and writers because they only need to dictate the stories orally. I think this is the down side of it. It is because the more advanced abilities children get, the less effective this approach will be..Looking on the bright side, this approach is good because there is a direct link between oral and written language.
Literature-based approach
This book reports that this approach is one that uses children's literature with the intention of focusing on meaning, interest, and enjoyment, while addressing individual children's needs in teaching them to read..
When I first saw this approach, I could think of my old days. When I was young, my father was beside my bed, reading Korean folk tales so that I could get to sweet dreams. Alternatively, I myself sometimes read those stories..
I think one of the merits of this approach is being natural. You can enhance your reading ability by reading interesting materials. How simple but efficient was it is!..
In addition, there are innumerous contents in literature which is enough to stimulate children's creativity..It can also applied not only in class but in elsewhere, because what you need is reading materials, not where you are..
The Whole Language approach
Whole language describes a literacy instructional philosophy which emphasizes that children should focus on meaning and moderates skill instruction. It can be contrasted with phonics-based methods of teaching reading and writing which emphasize instruction for reading and spelling..educators who believed that skill instruction was important for students' learning and some researchers in education were skeptical of whole language claims and said so loudly. Whether it was associated with whole language or not, the 1990s saw statistically-significant declines in student achievement nationwide on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Much of the blame for these declines was pinned on whole language. Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, whole language skeptics generated considerable research that cast considerable doubt on features of whole language that de-emphasized skills, especially in phonics.