Look at this passage:
Sally first tried setting loose a team of gophers. The plan backfired when a dog chased them away. She then entertained a group of teenagers, and was delighted when they brought their motorcycles. Unfortunately, she failed to find a Peeping Tom listed in the Yellow pages. Furthermore, her stereo system was not loud enough. The crab grass might have worked but she didn’t have a fan that was sufficiently powerful. The obscene phone calls gave her hope until the number was changed. She thought about calling a door-to-door salesman but decided to hang up a clothesline instead. It was the installation of blinking neon lights across the street that did the trick. She eventually framed the ad from the classified section.
Now what could this be about? Well, it may look like a series of random sentences, but in fact, it is a meaningful narrative.
In figuring out the passage, you could try a bottom-up approach. That would involve drilling down into the details, poring over every word, parsing and splicing the bits into grammar, spelling, word recognition, even the syntactic structures. In the end, however, this approach probably wouldn’t tell you the meaning, because there’s one thing missing: context.
So let me give you the context of the story: it’s about a woman who is trying to get her obnoxious neighbors to move out of the neighborhood. Now read it again and you will understand the passage.
Providing the context is a top-down approach to comprehension. We didn’t focus on the details, the minutiae. Instead we looked for ‘global meaning’, the gist of the story. This is the approach I often ask our listeners to take when listening to a new lesson: “Sit back, listen for the overall idea. Figure out whatever you can. We’ll get to the details later.” By doing this the listener creates a context and starts to put the meaning into place from there. [Even if the listener guesses ‘incorrectly’ the important thing is that he is mobilizing his cognitive faculties of thinking, inferencing, and generating hypotheses about the meaning. This is known as ‘deep processing’, useful because ‘the mind remembers what the mind does’. ]
By zeroing in straight away on specific details, the listener forfeits an understanding the broader context and the overall meaning passes him by. When listening in real life situations, it is usually much more efficient to go for global meaning, for gist, rather than for details. The same holds true for listening to ChinesePod. Don’t get hooked on the details until you understand the gist.
Now I would note that sometimes in the podcasts we prompt the context by telling you, but at other times we don’t. Why? My view is that we should vary it. In real speech, people don’t necessarily create contexts for their interlocutors. On the other hand, in real speech we can use the physical context, body language, and knowledge of the world to help us build that context. (I am convinced that an eclectic approach to teaching is better than an ideological one, so variation is the key.)
All of this is not to say that there is no role for bottom-up processing. That will be the subject of another conversation.
Ken Carroll 凯恩
Have you ever seen Blue’s Clues?
Never seens Blues Clues.
Hi Ken,
When you talk about top-down learning, things being cognitive, and such I think of Blues Clues. There’s an article out there somewhere about how it is made, but I can’t find it. I know the show to be extremely engaging as I watched (over and over and over) my nephew and niece watch it, and they ‘yell’ out the answers when the narrator asks the question and there is a pause to allow viewer-interaction, that’s the yelling my nephew and niece do. They can watch the show like five times because each time they pick up more of the clues and answers.
Anyway, I wish someone would put out a language-instruction program in this format with fun older-learner topics. It would be the ‘right’ way to do a videopod. The subtlties of the timing, storyline, clues and visuals is something to be seen — and is what would separate it from the old language instruction video tapes and scenarios that have been produced.
I don’t know if you can write it off in China, but after your official Cpod research and purchase of tapes, I’m sure your daughter would love it!
http://nickjr.co.uk/shows/blues/index.aspx
Q: How does finding clues help kids learn?
Angela: Clues are a way kids can solve problems. If Blue has a problem that needs to be worked out, you have to pay attention to the entire episode. Each clue narrows the problem down for the kids, and they have to think carefully to solve it. Having them write down each clue is an educational message. They’ll need to write things down as adults.
Q: Can you talk about the interactivity that kids experience while watching Blue’s Clues?
Alice: Kevin asks the preschoolers questions and then waits for an answer because he can’t go on without their help. We’ve done a lot of research to see how kids respond to these questions. One hundred preschoolers view every episode, and we pay attention to their responses.
Angela: One of the biggest things we believe in is that TV can be active. There’s stuff going on in children’s head while they’re watching the show. Especially when kids are moving around all the time. We say things slower than most shows to help the kids grasp everything.
Long Pauses
I think you could occassionally work in more pauses into your scripts. Your current ‘format’ doesn’t have much in terms encouraging ‘production’. Although the podcasts can be paused, rewound, ff, etc., and I do this a lot now as I wander about town, but I think many of your students are listening in cars, train, on bikes and don’t really want to be hitting buttons.
To maintain the nice flow of chatting, you could introduce the pauses when you review words.
a: ni xihuan shang wang ma?
b. here we have the word xihuan which means to like.
a. ni xihuan ma?
pause—– “listerner” can vocalize “wo xi huan” “ni xihuan” “xihuan” etc.
b. wo xi huan
a. Great, the other word we heard in the sentence is shang wang, surf the internet.
b. ni xihuan shang wang ma
pause……”listerner can vocalize “wo xihuan shang wang”
a. Did you say that outloud?
pause….
Wo xihuan shang wang. Ask us once more Jenny and we’ll think of something else we like.
b. Ni xihuan sheme?
pause….long….
a. Great. Wo xihuan shang wang. Wo ye xihuan lan qiu.
b. Wo ye xihuan lan qiu. Wo zui xihuan ping pang qiu.
a. Hao de, okay let’s look at the next phrase.
This format I suggest would be unique from ‘language tapes’ in the length of pauses, the embedding in a real-lifelike dialogue, and has interesting chatting before and after.
I think you may satisfy much more the many Cpodster that have been mentioning Pinseleur like materials.
I just use the pause button on my iPod and repeat after Jenny.
I agree with David that there should be more opportunity to repeat the words, sentences of the dialogue, etc without having to hit the pause button on your mp3-player. I know that in the learning center the sentences have an associated ‘play’ button that you can hit again and again until you can reproduce the sentence, but that is something that I can only do when sitting in front of my computer, not when I’m on the road. But getting longer pauses in there may break the flow of the lessons. An alternative could be to offer an additional mp3 with the dialogue + vocabulary + sample sentences with adequate pauses so that one can repeat these things and learn to reproduce the material. I wouldn’t mind if this was part of the basic or premium package, it would have added value.
Regards
Marc Heyvaert
How do we ‘process’ language
I’d forgotten this little ‘clip, it’s fascinating. I don’t know how it might apply to Chinese, can a Chinese person pick out the meaning of their words with just certain strokes in place, say the radical on the left and a few on the right?
“Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are,”
Hi, loved the article on bottom-up and top-down strategies as this is something I’m looking into for my DELTA assignment. I’d like to use the passage on Sally if I may, could you possibly tell me from where it is?
Thanks.
pin, it came from a British tefl source, though I can no longer rememeber where. Let me try to find out. I’ll let you know.
Ken
Very interesting. I like the top-down concept and also the way you drill-down in the lessons from the general to the detailed. The best approach is to challenge the learner to think rather than to just supply the answer right away to a passive recipient. This makes the lesson more active in a subtle sort of way. I think these kinds of techniques are an effective approach to teaching in the regular PodCast format. It still doesn’t satisfy the desire for a mobile version of the learning center, but I now see that all this was discussed long ago without any closure.