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This paper deals with an information processing dimension of listening activities. The main purpose of the study is to investigate how selected listening activities proposed by Peterson (1991) and Brown (2001) for ESL contexts are employed by students in Korean middle schools, high schools, and universities, with special attention to different types of listening processing: bottom-up, top-down, and interactive. Using a questionnaire survey, data were collected from 600 students to identify their use of listening activities. The results indicated that the listening activities used by Korean students were generally limited in variety and were not in accordance with their education levels. The learners in general resorted to the top-down type most frequently. An investigation of how each education group (middle school, high school, and university) employs different types of listening activities revealed that each group employed the top-down type most frequently, lacking the bottom-up and interactive types. On the basis of the results, pedagogical implications are discussed and suggestions are made for activating listening activities, which is in turn expected to lead to learners’ increased listening competence.