This study investigated the relative contributions of linguistic knowledge and strategy use to L2 listening success, especially in bottom-up and top-down dominant listening tasks. Participants (n = 130) were Korean college students in a required listening course. The tested variables for linguistic knowledge were sentence processing speed, grammar, receptive vocabulary, and productive vocabulary. Listening strategy use was measured with a metacognitive awareness listening questionnaire. We hypothesized that linguistic knowledge will make greater contributions to Bottom-Up-Listening-Comprehension (BULC) than to Top-Down-Listening Comprehension (TDLC), and different aspects of strategies will be accessed in each comprehension type due to different psycholinguistic features of the tasks. A series of stepwise multiple regressions were conducted and confirmed our prediction. The unique variance explained by linguistic knowledge was 27.8% in BULC, but 22.4% in TDLC. Strategy items that address problem solving and mental translation were significantly related to BULC, while items dealing with directed attention and person knowledge had significant explanatory power for TDLC.