Week 9 - Top-Down and Bottom-Up Strategies

The Top-Down and the Bottom-Up presentations of content are two strategies we can use when presenting a new content in class. Fluent listening depends of the use of both processes operating simultaneously. Therefore, regarding a second language class embedded with culture, both directions are productive depending on the material that will be presented. The material I presented in my lesson plan (and actual class) was a 1 minute video in Portuguese which is a trailer for a documentary series called “O Negro no Futebol Brasileiro”, focusing the black soccer players in the beginning of the 20^th century in Brazil. The video is spoken in Portuguese and has Portuguese subtitles.

According to Jack C. Richards, "When working with students with Comprehension, we have to make sure that we are not just working with words or sentences, but also activating background knowledge, encouraging students to make predictions, to guess what's coming, to draw on their knowledge to enable them to listen the way people do in authentic listening situations." (Video published by Cambridge University Press ELT, 2011)

My procedures were: show the video once and then ask the students to guess the main topic and some contents mentioned by the narrator and the three interviewed persons. Write in the board each word or sentence that the students say. Show the video for the second time, and then ask the students to comment about the images, connecting them to what they already guessed about the series. Write in the board the names of the visual elements on the video. Show images related to the topic, to boost vocabulary and the notion that soccer is something very present in all the country. Around 12 images of types of soccer fields, especially the informal ones in the rural areas, in poor environments, on the beach, and images of different kinds of shoes and barefoot feet (a picture of an infant’s feet), as well as various types of ground. Write in the board all this vocabulary, pointing to the images corresponding to each word.

Show the video for the third time and then stop in some sentences of the subtitles to analyse every word and the meaning of the complete sentences. Discuss the aspects of the history of the African-Brazilian people in the formation of Brazilian population, asking the students to compare and contrast with the US history regarding the African-American people when the slavery ended. Show the video for the forth time and give them a sheet with 7 questions about the video. The questions are written in Portuguese, therefore, take some time to scaffold their comprehension of the vocabulary in the questions. If someone needs, play the video again while they work in writing the answers. In this Lesson Plan, the first attempt is to show students an important aspect of the society formation in Brazil from the point of view of the historians’ approach to race issues in the beginning of the history of soccer as a sport in Brazil. 

To bring these elements to the class, it is necessary to activate the students’ background knowledge. This is the Top-Down process. The linguistic goal is to have the students exposed to the vocabulary and the sentences that are used to advertise the HBO documentary series “O Negro no Futebol Brasileiro” in the one-minute trailer. The use of a topic like soccer is likely to engage students because they usually enjoy sports in this age.

I consider this video challenging, but possible to show to Portuguese Language novice students. Scaffolding their learning by analyzing each sentence and clarifying each word is a Down-Top process. My intention is to scaffold their learning by coming up with comparisons and contrasts between the Brazilian and American history regarding the African people brought to both countries as slaves and what were the consequences of this historical fact. With the detailed study of all the sentences, the goal is to improve the students’ vocabulary and present to them complex sentences to improve the understanding of the Portuguese syntax.

Do you think this lesson plan is effective? Is this class dynamics interesting?