The Bottom Up Skills

Bottom up skills are skills which help in decoding. "Bottom-up refers to that part of the aural comprehension process in which the understanding of the the "heard" language is worked out proceeding from sounds to words to grammatical relationships in lexical meanings" (Morley 2001)

A List of Bottom Up Skills

(This list has been compiled from a number of sources: Peterson (1991), and Brown (2001). They are are listed in a rough order of student conceptual difficulty):

• discriminating between intonation contours in sentences
• discriminating between phonemes
• listening for word endings
• recognizing syllable patterns
• being aware of sentence fillers in informal speech
• recognizing words, discriminate between word boundaries
• picking out details
• differentiating between content and function words by stress pattern
• finding the stressed syllable
• recognizing words with weak or central vowels
• recognizing when syllables or words are dropped
• recognizing words when they are linked together in streams of speech
• using features of stress, intonation and prominence to help identify important information

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