How to get rid of the 'Bottom-up Syndrome'?

[Vytenis]

Hi folks, here I am again to make another little tempest

As a sequel to my previous thread "how to get rid of Lithuanian English" I'm starting this new one: "how to get rid of bottom-up syndrome". Now, I'm not so sure if everybody understands what I mean by "bottom-up syndrome", it's too difficult for me to explain. It can be best summarized by the following: the difficulties in language reception and further language improvement, that have been caused by teaching me English bottom-up. I seemed to have problems explaining certain fine points in the "Lithuanian English" thread. I kind of tried to sort it out in my own head and at the same time explain to others, that there were certain methods of English teaching, that were imposed on me at school, that made my subsequent life much more difficult. Learning and spitting with blood type of thing . Worse than that, even now I am having problems trying to understand English. I would call it "bottom-up syndrome". It's not just that the process of teaching bottom up is what I have a bone to pick with. It's much worse than that! It leaves such a deep and crippling imprint in all your subsequent efforts of language reception and lenguage improvement. I tried to carry this message across in the "Lithuanian English" thread, but I may not have been so successful in verbalizing the idea. So some of the folks may have gotten me wrong. What this imprint of teaching language bottom-up has done for my further life is a crippling effect. Now I am in a constant stress trying to unconsciously UNDERSTAND the English language bottom-up and improve my English bottom-up. I know it's wrong, but this piece of software is so deeply ingrained into my subconscious mind that I have difficulty getting rid of it. Now, as I've mentioned before, I am learning German. This language I am learning strictly top-down. And this gives me such a lightness of being! It's such an awesome experience - a breath of fresh air. It's like going downhill. While my 18+ years experience of learning English can be at best compared to something unnatural, like doing something that makes you taste your own blood in your mouth.

OK, I am not sure if you can still follow me . Sorry, I just find it difficult to verbalize it myself.

Well, to make it more clear what it means to learn "bottom-up" or "top-down", here I give you their definitions I found on the web. Here they are:


bottom-up: Language learning that proceeds from the most basic blocks of language, such as words, and then proceeding to more complex structures, and finally to meaning. This can be contrasted to top-down learning where students try to understand the general message without understanding all of the constituent parts. Listening for exact phrases and words would be considered a bottom-up listening activity, whereas listening for the gist would be considered a top-down activity. Also, studying individual grammatical structures or sentence structures would be bottom-up.


top-down: Studying language as a whole. Trying to understand the meaning of a reading or listening selection without worrying about the individual components of language. Listening for the gist and reading for the gist are two types of top-down activities. The learner is trying to understand using cues such as intonation, tone of voice or body language without focusing on specific words and structures. Top-down learning is thought to be important for producing automatic processing. Top-down techniques can be contrasted with bottom-up techniques.

Note though, that I am talking here not just about teaching or learning a language "bottom-up" or "top-down", but about the long lasting effects of it in your further efforts to improve your language and especially in reception skills.


UFFF! OK, enough!

[corey]

I'm not sure what happened in the last thread you talked about but I have learned a language "top-down" and I also believe it is a better way to teach a language. In fact, I think it is the basis for much of modern communicative language teaching theory.

Corey

[Roger]

I may have arrived at an incomplete picture of what you were trying to explain, but, on the other hand, I have been through L2 acquiring process a number of times, and I can't for the life of me say, my teachers stuck to one or the other way exclusively.
I reckon, you need to combine both approaches. To acquire3 new vocabulary by inference from a context is a grat way; however, looking things up in a monolingual dictionary is not to be frowned upon. If you understand definitions and explanations in the target language, then you are acquiring new vocabulary efficiently enough. So long as you avoid using a bilingual dictionary, that is.

But with your long exposure to the English language, you will by now be familiar with many nuances that cannot be rendered into Lithuanian verbatim. I am referring to figures of speech, phrases, idioms etc. These you learn best by paraphrasing rather than translating.
Here the problem often is that if you are speaking in the target language, you may want to use your mother tongue's idiomatic expressions where there might be no adequate English equivalent.

[Vytenis]

I agree with you, Roger. Looking up a word in an English-English dictionary is something like when an English-speaking friend explains to you what the word means. It IS effective. However, some monolingual dictionaries I find worse than others. Some give just too much headache A really good English-English dictionary that I could recommend to everyone is Collins Cobuild. Their definitions are clear and smooth, easy to read and understand. Besides, they always give you very nice examples, not made up, but taken from the real-life sources. I have never encountered any better dictionaries than Collins Cobuild. Know any?

Concerning the bottom-up and top-down things, to briefly summarize my long rambling-on in a previous message, I firmly believe that we learn the language FOR communication and most effectively VIA communication, i.e. understanding the meaning and trying to express the meaning ourselves. Meaning has to be first, form - second (it's not that we have to learn the dead language forms first and only then learn how to combine them in order to express our thoughts. This is like starting building the house from the roof). Therefore I favor top-down and leave bottom-up just for mopping-up some persistant error areas or other purposes like that. I have arrived at this "communicative approach" conclusion by my own painful experience, not by blindly adopting some fashionable "-izm"

By the way, season's greetings

[Kimmer]

Re: Bottoms Up vs Top Down

Different strokes for different folks!

Your point is well taken. For example, should you look each word in the expression above up in the dictionary you would find a definition that would not necessarily help you to understand its full meaning.(Bottoms up!).

If you were to hear the expression in a larger context you would have a better chance of understanding its true meaning and would more than likely find an opportunity to use the expression in "real" conversation. (Top down!)

I really believe that the way that your brain is wired determines what works best for you. As a teacher, I introduce students to as many methods of learning as possible and encourage them to find the way that works best for them and for their purpose for learning another language.

Cheers,
Kimmer

[Vytenis]

Kimmer, you may be right that different brains function differently. But in such case it becomes useless to talk about ANY approach or method, because you never know for whom it will work and for whom it won't. And this in turn leaves us language teachers helpless and confused without any clear guidelines. Maybe people ARE different, allright, but as far as I can judge from my own experience and from that of my students, most of my students are very poor in English and I can very clearly see that this has been the effect of too much bottom-up teaching.

[Kimmer]

With all due respect!

Both teachers and students find a style that works for them. I try to provide a range of activities that are visual, auditory and kinesthetic. I agree with what I understand you to be saying; Language is a "lived experience". Different groups with different purposes and with a range of learning styles challenge us to develop a full "bag of teaching tricks". Of course there are multicultural differences in learning style as well. For me, that's what makes teaching so exciting and rewarding.

This doesn't mean chaos in the classroom nor does it mean rigidly adhering to one method. I adhere to the credo; "If a student is not learning the way I teach then I must change the way I teach."

[LarryLatham]

However, some monolingual dictionaries I find worse than others. Some give just too much headache A really good English-English dictionary that I could recommend to everyone is Collins Cobuild. Their definitions are clear and smooth, easy to read and understand. Besides, they always give you very nice examples, not made up, but taken from the real-life sources. I have never encountered any better dictionaries than Collins Cobuild. Know any?

I quite agree, vytenis, that the Collins COBUILD is the best dictionary for students that I've seen. It's the one I've recommended to students for 10 years. I wish there were an American dictionary that was as good, but I don't know any. Some are getting better, however.

I also think you may have a valid arguement, here, regarding teaching from the Top Down. I wish there were more people commenting on it. So far, this is a good discussion with excellent comments, but not many people seem to be "jumping in and splashing about", as I believe our good friend from Oz, Norm Ryder, might say. Perhaps there's not many around who have much knowledge about it. I know I don't know much about it, but the idea seems to square pretty well so far with what I do believe I know about teaching and learning language.

Larry Latham

[Duncan Powrie]

Dear Vytenis,

Did your "bottom-up" learning experiences involve memorizing decontextualized vocabulary lists for tests, or mindlessly repeating strange sentences, or awful things like that? If so, you have my sympathies! Not many people nowadays would agree with such methods (that doesn't stop them continuing to be used in Japanese high schools, though!). I'd like to know, however, if you think the distinction between top-down and bottom-up is really still valid, especially in view of the work done by the COBUILD project etc (which you mention); I myself can see little difference between a student studying words > meanings/uses > contexts/example sentences from a book, and the same student encountering the same items in a class(room) based, except that in so-called communicative classrooms, the stages in the process are often reversed, and there would seem less chance things will be as clearly understood and learned (especially if the teacher only thinks of contexts or topics, and gives no serious thought to the language that makes communication within such contexts more feasible). That is, do you really think top-down, communicative approaches are THAT effective in the LONG TERM? I have felt for a long time that there are not enough clear LINGUISTIC criteria by which communication in a class is judged to have been successful or not (although task-based learning does address linguistic goals/outcomes), and when language is taught, it is all too often "pre-taught" (=spoon-fed) IMMEDIATELY before e.g. encountering a SINGLE text, and in no way a reflection of having actually LEARNT the (full range of) meaning(s) beyond said text or class activity! Any success you feel might, therefore, be illusory, and almost certain to fade! I would, therefore, lean more towards bottom-up study now for teachers at the very least!!

[Duncan Powrie]

Yes, I'd like to ask everyone if they feel that communicative "receptive skills" lesson planning is a crock of cack...I can see that the strategies that we are supposed to develop in learners are applied and do hold true for what NATIVE users of a language (can) do, but I really think there has been a serious underestimation of how much knowledge is actually needed to get to the point where you can happily and easily breeze through a text picking up all the discoursal nuances (actually, CLT doesn't seriously address levels of organization above the sentence either, come to think of it, perhaps because this knowledge can only be won by a more FINE-GRAINED analysis!). So, I have never been comfortable with just "selecting" and teaching vocabulary ad-hoc from randomly-selected texts, and doubt if students who spend time on such skills ever really get to the point where they are functioning independently of the teacher and drawing on their own knowledge base (that's not to say that texts are a breeze for students in communicative classes - they often find them quite "testing", especially when the teacher fails to anticipate what will be a problem). That being said, encountering words in context is obviously important - the question for me is whether the contexts we provide are necessary and sufficient, planned and organized in a principled way, and I don't think CLT has come far enough in these regards.

[Duncan Powrie]

Oh, just one last thought, generally can't adult learners be left to "transfer" whatever top-down skills they have across from their native language? If we are going to concentrate on anything to help them "understand" it might perhaps better be cross-cultural communication, expectations and (mis)understandings etc! I think that ultimately there comes a point where "meaning" becomes nebulous (at both the top and bottom levels), and that at the top level, a student either "gets it" or they don't (I am imagining a student here who has been taught "humanistically", and doesn't have too many hangups from being taught badly - knowledge in itself isn't bad is it, it's how it is applied and used that can make it so!).

[Vytenis]

I'd like to know, however, if you think the distinction between top-down and bottom-up is really still valid, especially in view of the work done by the COBUILD project etc (which you mention); I myself can see little difference between a student studying words > meanings/uses > contexts/example sentences from a book, and the same student encountering the same items in a class(room) based, except that in so-called communicative classrooms, the stages in the process are often reversed, and there would seem less chance things will be as clearly understood and learned (especially if the teacher only thinks of contexts or topics, and gives no serious thought to the language that makes communication within such contexts more feasible). That is, do you really think top-down, communicative approaches are THAT effective in the LONG TERM?

Yes. I feel communicative approach IS effective. Maybe I did not catch some of the points you made, but my general idea is that we learn ANY language best when we use it for communication right from the beginning and when we think less about learning as such. Language is one of those skills in life (like walking, running or swimming) that are not consciously learned, but automatically acquired.

[Duncan Powrie]

Thanks for replying, Vytenis! Sorry about my writing - sometimes I am ashamed to say it, but I am a native speaker! Anyway, obviously the Communicative Approach has a lot going for it, and I can understand your faith in it compared to your earlier learning experiences...so, let me put it another way (and other learners, please feel free to respond!): Do you think that there is too great a responsibility placed on the learner to "perform" in communicative classrooms - that they become victims of the "You learn to speak by speaking" dictat (when in natural acquisition, listening is so very important) - and that there is a corresponding temptation if not a tendency for teachers to forget how much this performance depends on a solid competence (at least as far as their taken-for-granted fluency is concerned)? By the way, the classrooms I have in mind are ones in which learners may not be as motivated or going on very advanced as you obviously are...rather, I am imagining an "average" classroom where students muddle their way through activities (what's at issue is not whether they make mistakes or not, but that they may not know WHAT to say and HOW TO say it), and teachers grin inanely and always offer only "feedback", never QUALITY "input"...even if you have wonderful teachers, the fact is, they have a wonderful student in you! (Heh, maybe you should be thankful for your previous learning!! ).

[Stephen Jones]

Language is one of those skills in life (like walking, running or swimming) that are not consciously learned, but automatically acquired.

Only true for learning one's native language(s) . Not in the least true for learning a foreign language.

[Duncan Powrie]

Damn I should've made Stephen's point myself...except that it may be possible, if the student believes it to be so (and is a natural linguist to boot)...what I've been asking about is really to do with student choice, rather than in trying to impose my own approach...I might be laboring under a misapprehension by believing that improved descriptions have anything to offer students or even teachers...