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Teaching Listening Steven Brown cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sà £o Paulo Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA www.cambridge.org  © Cambridge University Press 2006 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2006 Printed in the United States of America Book layout services: Page Designs International  Table of Contents 1 2 3 4 Introduction 1 Activation of prior knowledge for improved listening comprehension 2†¦show more content†¦The idea of prior knowledge is one part of the cognitive model of language processing. That model says that when people listen or read, we process the information we hear both top-down and bottom-up. Top-down means using our prior knowledge and experiences; we know certain things about certain topics and situations and use that information to understand. Bottom-up processing means using the information we have about sounds, word meanings, and discourse markers like first, then and after that to assemble our understanding of what we read or hear one step at a time. 2 Teaching Listening I like to use as an example of the two kinds of processing my experience buying postcards at an Austrian museum. I speak no German. Having calculated that the postcards would cost sixteen schillings, I walked up to the counter and gave the clerk a twenty-schilling note. She opened the cash register, looked in it, and said something in German. As a reflex, I dug in my pocket and produced a one-schilling coin and gave it to her. She smiled and handed me a five-schilling coin. I managed the conversation based on my prior knowledge of how one deals with small change at a store. In some sense, I didn’t need to speak German, I just needed my prior knowledge. Later on that same trip, however, I did need to manage a transaction â€Å"bottom up† when I asked at the Madrid train station for tickets and was answered by a torrent of language that