CALL Review II

There are two listening activities. One is Top-down listening activity and the other is Bottom-up listening activity. Top-down listening activity is refers to the use of background knowledge in understanding the meaning of the message. Background knowledge consists of context, that is, the situation and topic, and co-text, in other words, what came before and after. For example, I listen to a news of discovering a planet very far away which is similar to the Earth. Then, I think of background knowledge of planet, observatory, space, etc. So I understand the content of the news. On the other hand, Bottom-up listening activity is the comprehension achieved by dividing and decoding the sound signal bit by bit, where the ability to separate the stream of speech into individual words becomes more important. For example, I ask a native for finding a location on my map. Then, he/she tells me where it is pointing to the map. Then, I listen to what he/she says and try to find what the key words are among the speech.

For those two activities, Podcast can be useful. Podcast is a compound word of iPod and broadcasting. Bloggers post audio or video files to download on their blogs. Podcatchers (ex. iTunes or Winamp) are used to automatically identify and download new files. Updated new files can be downloaded and stored into individual user’s PC.

 For instance, "BBC World Service: English We speak" is a good listening material among podcasts. On this web, BBC uploads listening files categorized in various areas. You can listen to many kinds of listening files or even download them. Also, you can easily set up RSS(Really Simple Syndication) on your blog which allows web publishers to have other people's content displayed on their own web pages. It is called "Feeding."