Top Up Listening
by Chris Cleary, Bill Holden, Terry Clooney
Top-Up gives students practice in drawing meaning from naturally spoken English in two ways: using their knowledge of the world and of the language to guess what's coming next, and using their knowledge of how English is actually structured as a sound.
What do we mean? - how words run together, how sounds are lost, how vowels naturally weaken and entire words are dropped. Without knowledge of such patterns, listening is impossible. Lots of practice! Lots of variety!
Top-Up Features
A wide range of listening types: announcements, news broadcasts, conversations, service encounters
A wide variety of listening tasks: listening for gist, listening for overall understanding, listening for specific information
Practice in inferencing, practice in using knowledge of content, practice in predicting and checking
Listening Clinics: explicitly teaching the sound system of English — how sounds change or are lost or are inserted, how sounds run together
Speaking tasks: helping students think about and get ready for what they will hear and giving students the opportunity to use language from the listening in an active way
Topics of intrinsic interest to college-age students
