These strategies help students understand the larger context of what is being said. Exercises include reading a passage and asking students to pick out the main idea. They can gradually learn to look past all the details to find the primary topic of a spoken passage. Another useful top-down exercise is making predictions. Stop and ask students to predict what will happen next in an oral passage. This enhances attention and involves the students in what is being said. Likewise, they can make inferences--educated conclusions that are not in the passage but were implied. Finally, asking students to summarize a passage helps them focus on the big ideas and not get too tangled up in details.
Bottom-up strategies involve listening for detail. Ask students to listen to a passage once, then tell them the questions you are going to ask them on a quiz. Now read the passage again, and let the students take notes or actually answer the questions as you read. This will help them stay alert for important details. Another bottom-up activity is to give students a list of words, and after reading a passage, ask them to identify words that were not in the oral account.
Read students' favorite song lyrics aloud and ask them to summarize the lyric. This high-interest activity has the advantage of getting students' attention early in the passage and keeping them hooked until the end. Also read passages from their favorite authors and poets. You can even have them pick out the materials they want you to read. These types of listening and comprehension activities promote the initial skill of attention, which students can apply to a wider range of oral texts as they progress.
Metacognitive thinking means thinking about thinking. In practice, it involves helping students become self-aware as they listen. Ask them to pick a strategy for listening to a passage. After the passage, have them evaluate how effective their strategy was. Have them come up with ways to improve the strategy. As they begin to become aware of how they listen, they will take charge of finding the listening strategies that work best for them.