Assignment 5

Teaching Listening
1. When learners listen to a stream of sound, they use both ‘top-down’
and ‘bottom-up’ processing. Match the processing models to the correct
definition. Two of the definitions are not correct (1 point):

Processing models Definition

1. 1) ‘top-down’ processing

2. 2) ‘bottom-up’ processing

Definitions
a. Listeners only listen to parts of a conversation and take small ‘rests’
from the stream of sound.

b. Listeners try to make sense of the stream of sound by trying to

understand words or grammatical structures they are familiar with.

c. Listeners process what they hear in relation to their background

knowledge of the topic or the situation.

d. Listeners try to make sense of the stream of sound by following the

logical order of what they hear.

2. Letters a to g describe different listening strategies which are

associated with either top-down or bottom-up processing. Match the
strategies to the correct processing model (1 point).

Top-down processing Bottom-up processing

Listening strategies
a. Listening carefully to football results.
b. Listening to flight departure announcements in order to hear the
departure gate.
c. Predicting the content of a lecture or short talk on a subject that the
listener knows something about.
d. Listening attentively to try and understand (or infer) a speaker’s
attitude to something because the speaker has not stated their opinion clearly.
 e. Listening to get the general idea of the topic of a conversation.
f. Listening to a series of short conversations in order to understand
where the conversation is taking place.
g. Listening in order to do a dictation activity.

3. Design a sequence of activities for the following recorded text.

Include at least one pre-listening, one or more while-listening, and one post-
listening activity (4 points).

Well, I do the typical English thing and have three meals a day. When I’m at
home, I’ll have a light breakfast of juice and cereal and a cup of coffee. For lunch
I’ll usually just have a salad or a sandwich in the summer, and some soup and a roll
in the winter. We have our main meal in the evening – usually just a main course,
some chicken and vegetables, usually potatoes, although we eat quite a lot of rice
and pasta too. And then we have some fruit and a yoghurt, or sometimes some
cheese. We don’t have a starter or a proper dessert unless we go out to eat in a
restaurant. But we often have a special Sunday lunch – a traditional roast ‘dinner’
with something like roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, parsnips, carrots,
cabbage. It’s great. And then I will make a special dessert like apple pie… the
children love that meal.
Thomas, B., & L. Matthews (2007). Cambridge Vocabulary for First
Certificate with Answers. Cambridge: CUP

Teaching Reading

Choose a text from a course book and exercises to it. Analyze them taking
into account whether they follow the 3 stages (pre-reading, while-reading, post-
reading) and what exercises are provided to each stage. Think whether all the
tasks are relevant and suggest any additional exercises to the text (4 points).