The Effects of Pre-Listening Bottom up and Top down Activities on Iranian EFL Learners’ Listening Comprehension in the ninth Grade High Schools

Listening comprehension is a difficult skill for foreign language learners to develop. In designing suitable listening comprehension tasks, different forms of activities can be provided to reduce the demands of the task for the test takers (Chang & Read, ۲۰۰۶). Pre-listening activities are some preliminary activities acquainting students with the topic of listening task and activating their background knowledge on the content. This study investigated the effects of two pre-listening activities, bottom up as reviewing the unfamiliar vocabularies before the test and top down activities as participating in a discussion about the topic of listening tasks, on learners’ overall listening ability. To achieve these aims, a total number of ۴۷ Iranian elementary learners (in ninth grade high school) were randomly assigned to three groups (two groups containing seventeen students and a group of sixteen students) based on their scores in KET test. Group I received a glossary of unknown vocabularies before the test and the group II participated in a discussion related to the topic of the listening task before the test started, the third group as control group received no pre-listening treatment. The results of a series of one way ANOVAs indicated that the both types of activities bottom up and top down, were effective. The results of the study have some implications for EFL students, teachers and text book designers.