Improving listening comprehension skills is one of the urgent contemporary educational problems in the field of second language acquisition. Understanding how L2 listening comprehension works can have a serious influence on language pedagogy. The aim of the paper is to discuss the practical and methodological value of the notion of the perception base of the language. It also highlights the importance of structural features and frequency of linguistic units in helping to determine teaching priorities in English language teaching, specifically, when training listening skills. The leading approaches to the problem of the paper are the psycholinguistic and statistical ones which help to identify practical teaching principles. The paper illustrates these approaches with the findings on the perceptually relevant features and frequency of the English words and sentences and their linguistic features. The findings are discussed in terms of their application in developing bottom-up listening skills and tested in a listening comprehension experiment. The materials of this article may be of use to those who are interested in problems of speech perception and improving the existing listening comprehension teaching techniques

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