Let’s use the example of watching the TV news. In our first language, we probably make use primarily of top-down processing. Our previous experience of watching TV news gives us some knowledge and expectations from which to make predictions about the likely content, as well as the style of language that will likely be used by presenters and journalists. As a news item starts, we may recognise it as an ongoing story, and call upon our knowledge of the story's context. From there, we progress to “lower level” features to understand the finer details of the story. L2 learners use more of a combination of bottom-up and top-down processing. They may compensate for a lack of vocabulary by using top-down cues about the context, but often rely too heavily on bottom-up processing at the expense of these cues, focusing on individual words and sentences. We can help them make more use of top-down cues with classroom activities focusing on this.