The Roles of Top-Down and Bottom-Up English Teaching Strategies in Training Professionals

While many English teachers are aware of top-down versus bottom-up teaching from their days as graduate students or as teacher trainees many are unaware as to how these two approaches can also be used productively in classroom pedagogy, materials development, or lesson planning. In order to gain a snapshot as to how English for Specific Purposes (ESP) teachers in Japan, Vietnam, and Thailand use and apply these strategies, the presenter carried out an in-depth ethnographic survey and first-hand interviews. The preliminary results indicate that ESP teachers in Japan and Vietnam almost invariably utilize a bottom-up approach, which implies starting with microstructure (vocabulary, sentence syntax) and having learners mastering these items before macrostructural features (speech events, communicative purposes, genre features) are introduced, if at all. In this presentation, the speaker will outline some of the problems that may arise as a result of applying such a pedagogical strategy and will also describe how the two processes can work together, demonstrating how top-down approaches can be implemented among even low-intermediate level students using the presenter’s experience in teaching medical students. Finally, the argument will be made that teachers of specialized and professional English training programs could provide major benefits for their learners if they developed a greater awareness of utilizing top-down approaches in their classrooms.