Top-Down and/or Bottom-Up Processing in Iranian EFL Learners''' Listening Comprehension at Pre-Intermediate Level

This research is aimed at finding out whether Iranian EFL learners of English at the pre-intermediate level would prefer bottom-up or top-down processing in their listening comprehension. There were 90 students, 72 girls and 18 boys. All were in term 2 studying English translation and English literature at Islamic Azad University of Hamedan. Three experiments were carried out. In experiment, they heard a list of related words in each question and were asked to write down the last word, the onset of which was changed to tum it into a similar word which did not belong to the set, in each. In this experiment the learners were able to recognize the target words correctly and used bottom-up processing. In experiment2, a semantically constraining sentence was provided in place of a list of words in each question. A highly predictable word at the end of the sentence was replaced by one which differed from it by one phoneme. This substitute word was much less predictable but nonetheless acceptable in the context. In this experiment the learners were constrained by the sentences and could not realize the target words correctly and used top-down processing. In experiment 3, low frequency words were chosen which were unlikely to fall within the vocabulary of the learners but which phonologically resembled high-frequency words they were likely to know. Sentences were designed in a way to provide a meaningful context for the low-frequency words. Here, the learners neither preferred bottom-up nor top-down processing; they also wrote a lot of non-words, and the difference between using the words'' onset and the words'' offset was not significant.