The purpose of this paper is to investigate the listening process of less proficient Japanese EFL learners. Specifically, it focuses on whether they tend to rely on bottom-up or on top-down processing, on which opinions are divided among researchers. In order to answer the question, four short passages were prepared and two different measures were taken: the idea unit analysis and the analysis by local and global question type. Participants included 91 university students (80 male and II female) in Tokyo. The results obtained indicate that the less proficient the listeners become, the more they tend to rely on bottom-up processing. It is assumed that the participants were not able to activate more cognitively demanding skills (top-down processing), simply because they preoccupy themselves with extracting information from the text instead of focusing globally on the whole story.