Dictation
Benefits of dictation
ü Students learn to discriminate the sounds of English, which is a fundamental skill.
Dictations focus students' attention on listening, which helps noisy students become quiet very quickly.
Dictations are very useful to either introduce new material or review old material.
ü Dictation makes the students and the teacher aware of the students' comprehension errors--phonological, grammatical, or both. In English, typical errors include the frequent omissions of bound morphemes such as:
o The -s plural
o The -'s possessive
o The -s third person singular
o The -ed ending for regular past participles.
ü Dictation shows students the kinds of spelling errors they are prone to make.
ü Dictation gives students practice in comprehending and transcribing clear English prose. Note: I find this important because we have all encountered awkward sentences in textbooks that are not good models of English writing, or raise grammatical, syntactic, or semantic questions that are not the point of the exercise to begin with. One example from a rather famous source: "When you receive a request like that, you cannot fail to obey it." This was in a textbook for a pre-intermediate class and came without a footnote to aid the student.
ü Dictation gives students valuable practice in note taking. ESL college students may already be in courses in which they must take notes of lectures delivered in English at normal speaking speed. While no one should take lecture notes that are exact transcriptions, learning to write spoken language quickly is an essential college skill.
ü Dictation gives practice in correct forms of speech. --Note: We have all read student compositions with grammatically correct sentences that are not correct forms, for example She is a surgeon of hearts or He is a good cooker.
ü Dictation can help develop all four language skills in an integrative way.
ü Dictation helps to develop short-term memory. Students practice retaining meaningful phrases or whole sentences before writing them down.
ü Dictation can serve as an excellent review exercise.
ü Dictation is psychologically powerful and challenging.
ü Dictation fosters unconscious thinking in the new language.
ü If the students do well, dictation is motivating.
ü Dictation involves the whole class, no matter how large it is.
ü During and after the dictation, all students are active.
ü Correction can be done by the students
ü Dictation can be prepared for any level.
ü The students, as well as the teacher, can get instant feedback if desired.
ü Dictation can be administered quite effectively by an inexperienced teacher.
ü While dictating, the teacher can (in fact should) move about, giving individual attention.
ü Dictation exercises can pull the class together during the valuable first minutes of class.
ü Dictation can provide access to interesting texts.
ü Knowing how to take dictation is a skill with "real world" applications. Many jobs demand accurate understanding of spoken orders (phone agents, dispatchers, administrative assistants, etc.). Also, the U.S. citizenship exam requires examinees to take a dictation.
ü Dictation can be a good indicator of overall language ability. (For its use in testing, the research of John W. Oller, Jr. is particularly useful.)
ü Dictation can be done with any level, depending on the text used
ü Dictation can be graded for a multi-level class (see below for more on this)
ü Dictation usually require very little preparation and photocopying
In fact, dictation can be used to decrease preparation time for other activities. Instead of spending hours making cut-up activities such as matching vocabulary and their definitions, why not just give the students blank slips of paper and dictate the necessary information to them in the classroom? This also gives the students more listening and writing /spelling practice.
FROM : THE ROLE OF DICTATION IN LANGUAGE LEARNING.
BY : MOHAMMAD TAGHI DELAVARI & ABUZAR BRIZI
ESFAHAN - 2009