Listeners and readers use four types of competences as they attempt to
comprehend oral or a written knowledge:
1. grammatical competence: knowledge of morphology, syntax, vocabulary;
2. sociolinguistic competence: knowing what is expected socially and
culturally by native speakers of the target language;
3. discourse competence: the ability to use pronouns, conjunction, and phrases
to link meanings across sentences, as well as the ability to recognize how
coherence is used to maintain the unity of the message (understand it as a whole);
4. strategic competence: the ability to use a number of guessing strategies to
compensate for missing knowledge.
Listeners and readers perform a variety of tasks in the comprehension process;
they analyze, summarize, compare, generalize, etc. Some tasks or subskills reflect
top-down processing, in which meaning is derived through the use of contextual
clues and activation of personal background knowledge.
These subskills include identifying kea ideas and guessing meaning.
Goodman states that “efficient comprehension does not result from precise
perception and identification of all elements, but from skill in selecting the fewest,
most productive cues necessary to produce guesses which are right”.
Other tasks or subskills reflect bottom-up processing, in which meaning is
understood from analysis of language parts. Simply put the listener(or reader)
combines sounds or letters to form words, then combines words to form phrases,
clauses, and sentences of the text.
Bottom-up subskills include discriminating between different sounds or
letters, recognizing word-order patterns, sentence structures and translating
individual words.
Top-down skills are more useful in second- language learning, as reading is
not based on oral language use, as is the case in the native language.
Bottom-up processing can be used effectively in learning to read the native
language , since oral language is already firmly in place. Therefore, in L1, orality
leads to literacy, while in L2, literacy leads to and improves orality.
However, the current view of listening and reading skills is that they involve
both bottom-up and top-down processing. Listening can be understood as a highly
complex, interactive operation in which bottom-up processing is mixed up with
top-down processing, the latter involving guessing. Evidence suggests that good
listeners and readers use two kinds of skills:
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