Steps to dictation - are we going in the right direction?

 Dictation is an old thing come back around in the curricular pendulum swing, and as we all know in the UK languages-teaching world, all students from year 10 and below will have a dictation test as part of their listening exam. There are some teachers who are quite against it, but I’m not one of them. I tend to see exams in terms of washback and feel it can only be good that there is more emphasis on forming the sound-spelling links and attention on the tiny processes of listening. The foundation paper awards 8 marks out of 40 (ie 20%) to these five dictated sentences, and 10 marks out of 50 at higher (hence also 20%). 

So today I want to talk about the exercises one might do building up to dictation, and whether these are the best way to go about it. 

On Friday I was doing a listening gap-fill with my year 10s. It had come out of the Active Hub book and I had looked at it and quite liked it. I had a few interesting pedagogical moments, though, which are worth sharing.

Firstly, the book had presented the sentences and their gaps so that the student couldn’t actually fill the gaps physically in the text that had been offered. 

So my first job was to put myself in the shoes of the learner and create a physical task that was going to reduce effort for the student, by transcribing the task and giving actual gaps to write in so they didn’t have to dart their eyes right left and centre. I printed it and gave it out to the students, and we did the listening.

I asked a random student for the first answer. But then I realised I was genuinely interested in what everyone had done. Thumbs up / thumbs in the middle / thumbs down generated mostly thumbs in the middle - in other words, it was OK, but it wasn’t the easiest of tasks. This surprised me because it seemed fairly accessible to me.

So out came the mini-whiteboards and I asked them what they came up with for the second sentence. This is where the fun started, because I noticed that sometimes, the sound of what had been heard would override any sense of what had been heard. The students got the CONSONANTS largely right, but sometimes struggled to discern the VOWELS. 

Teaching point: more work on minimal pairs might be very useful here. By that I mean pairs of words or phrases that sound very similar but have only minimal differences. In French, for example - j’ai douze ans / j’ai dix ans / j’ai deux ans, or copain / campagne. In German I have noticed a bit of confusion between ‘am’ and ‘um’.

By contrast, there were also some occasions where a student would not listen very carefully because they thought they had it. They wrote something grammatically OK, but it might not have had anything to do with what had been said. 

Teaching point: we are going to need to develop teaching strategies to ensure that this doesn’t happen when the students get to the actual dictation. I wonder about getting the student to write the first letter of each word they hear on the first listen, to give them a frame that they can fill in on subsequent listens. 

I also noticed students overlooking the little endings of words which contribute to grammatical accuracy in German (eg the ‘es’ on ‘letztes Jahr’) but often to actual meaning in French (j’ai préféré versus je préfère). We played the sentences two, three, four times and they did get them eventually.

Teaching point: training students to NOTICE these is a bit step away from listening for gist. We are going to have to train the students to change tack pretty dramatically when they get onto the dictation part of the listening test, and see it almost as a totally different type of test.

Then this is where it gets interesting. One of my students said that they didn’t like gap-fill, and found it difficult. I said I thought it was a good way to build up towards full dictation. As the mini-whiteboards were already out, I asked the students to vote. Of 15 in the class, we had two ‘don’t knows’, one in favour of gap fill, and all the rest - 12 - said that they would much rather jump straight into a full dictation task. I was fascinated by this - this is a very mixed ability group and there didn’t seem to be any correlation between proficiency and preference. They told me that gap fill forced them to listen for specific words and almost block out the ones that were already in the text, and they preferred dictation where they could concentrate on the full text. When I suggested that gap fill was a stepping stone towards full dictation, they suggested that a gap fill where I gave them the first letter of each word might be a better approach.

Teaching point: I have seen plenty of gap-fill listening tasks in the text books for the new GCSE, but I haven’t seen any first-letter dictations. We need to take on board the wisdom of my fabulous year 10 group and consider whether gap-fill dictations are preparing students for a different type of task and might actually be counter-productive. I will be making first-letter-dictations from now on. 

Anyway, where does this leave us? I want to draw a few conclusions:

1. Asking EVERYONE to show you an answer really does lead to much more effective pedagogy!

2. Students really do rely on consonants not vowels to build meaning (I found this in my doctoral research too), so you need to work lots of strategies to address this.

3. Grammatical morphemes (the little bits of words that add meaning) get overlooked in the general hunt for meaning - weigh up if they’re important in this context.

4. Go straight for full-on dictation, differentiated with first-letters of each word for those who might benefit. Gap-fill dictation seems to be tapping into different skills, so it might not be the best use of lesson time.

5. Again (this is a bit of a golden thread of this blog!) ASK your students about their experience of listening. I mean, I’ve got a darn PhD in second language listening and they still surprised me!