Getting dictatorial about dictation

My year 10 Germanists have their listening mock exam tomorrow, so they wanted to ‘do listening’ today. Poor sods not knowing this is my absolute favourite subject!

We worked through some exam strategies for a couple of questions from the AQA Sample 2 (they’re doing Sample 1 for the exam and I hope that they will have forgotten them by the time they do Sample 2 in the winter!). Then I thought: dictation! That’s actually the issue, isn’t it? From the exam perspective there’s a lot less room for making an educated guess, but also my gut feeling is that it would tell me a lot more about their experience of processing audio input in German. 

Here are the sentences they heard:

1 Man muss sich / im Urlaub / entspannen. (one must relax oneself on holiday)

2 Nächstes Jahr / werde ich / Abitur machen. (next year I will do A levels)

3 Wir haben / gestern / Trauben gegessen. (we have eaten grapes yesterday)

Because we were doing exam practice I started by keeping it as close as possible to the exam experience, which is: listen once all the way through, then you get it with pauses, and then you get it again all the way through. But they used mini-whiteboards so I could do a rapid check after each sentence

What I noticed and what we can build on

With the first one - Man muss sich im Urlaub entspannen (one should relax oneself on holiday), one student got writing straight away, on the first listen, but she wrote ‘Mein’ and not ‘man’. This speaks to a finding I had in my PhD that vowels are interpreted in quite a fluid way and that the consonants drive the meaning. We need to watch that a lot and train students in minimal pairs so that they a) are aware that this is something that inexperienced listeners do and b) can address it.

So… I made a rule: first listen is just a listen. NO WRITING until you get to the second listen. And the third listen is to fill in any gaps and to check your work.

So, how did my students process the input?!

Sound trumps sense

Again, i wrote about this in my PhD and it’s interesting and cool to see slightly older students learning a different language having the same experience. What I mean by ‘sound trumps sense’ is that students seem to me to be inclined to write what they HEAR regardless of whether it actually makes any sense. (one might almost say that their inner representation of the word they hear is ‘fuzzy’.) They are so preoccupied with the sensory, auditory experience that a cognitive, common sense experience gets eclipsed. Perhaps this is an illustration of cognitive load at work? For example students wrote:

Man muss ich im Urlaub entspannen (overlapping with a segmentation issue with ich versus sich - very subtle difference in pronunciation)

Im Erlaub (having a good go at a word they don’t know)

Sound trumps sense interacts with overlooking correct grammar

Man muss sich im Urlaub entspannend. This was the most common one - entspannend being an adjective meaning relaxing). I put it down to a frequency effect: we’ve had the adjective / gerund with the ‘d’ on the end far more frequently than the verb entspannen. They hear, they write. Do they check to see whether their sentence makes sense? Not really. 

In my PhD I found that even the most proficient students were fairly oblivious to grammatical endings which contain meaning (morphemes), and this strikes me as getting at the same thing. With a modal verb like man muss (one must), you need an infinitive, which in German mostly ends in ‘en’, at the very end of the sentence. My students do know this - if I asked them to say ‘one must go’ I don’t think any would write ‘man muss gehend’ rather than ‘gehen’. But that grammar point got totally forgotten about. 

Sound trumps sense interacts with lack of vocab

It makes sense, really, that where a student doesn’t have the vocabulary, they use the sound and that trumps the sense. 

In the first example one student wrote Im Uhrlaub (using vocabulary but not quite addressing that Uhr (clock / hour) doesn’t make sense here - but I can imagine that this might also be a spelling error that some Germans might make, given that Ur and Uhr are homophones. 

A more interesting example of sound trumps sense was with the second sentence 

Nächstes Jahr werde ich Abitur machen. (Next year I will do A-levels), where one student wrote Nächstes Jahr werde ich aber tue machen (next year I will do but do). 

Pedagogical points to think about

I know lots of commentators are against dictation but I still really like it, in part because of the unique insight it offers into the listener’s experience and the potential that has for a reflective teacher; way more than with a typical comprehension question. So my first point is:

Do lots of dictation and watch for common themes. 

They might well be the ones that I have noticed:

• Sound trumps sense

• Segmentation

• Grammar gets forgotten

• Lack of vocab can send students down very wrong tracks

There might well be other themes but I am interested that year 10 German is showing me similar issues that year 7-9 French did, despite the phonological differences between the two languages; that suggests to me that there is the potential for something a little more universal going on here. 

Ask students WHY they wrote what they wrote

Do this with curiosity and without judgement; it can only help your thinking with the next lesson, the next class, the next language. (it will also help build your relationships with the students!)

Tell students about the kinds of issues that arise

If they know that everyone is inclined towards not making sense, this is the first step to checking for sense when they write. By the end of our task one student was (good humouredly) badgering another ‘that doesn’t make sense does it so it can’t be right’.

Consider working with single words and non-words to help focus on phonemes

I have a link to very many French non-words in this blog. In the absence of a similar list in German or Spanish I would recommend opening a dictionary at random and finding a fairly rare word to allow students to ‘sound it out’, build confidence and begin to become aware of homophones.

Be aware of sounds which are spelled differently in English and the target language

I had a student who wrote ‘Trouben’ for ‘Trauben’ because his English spelling rules overrode the German ones at that stage. 

An exam strategy

Some less confident spellers might benefit from noting down some key phonemes before the dictation starts, to help them. We talked about ‘when I and E go walking, the second does the talking’ (forever indebted to Charlie Mann for that one), and then wrote down Einstein and Justin Bieber to help us remember. We also wrote down ‘deutsch’ to remember the ‘oi’ sound. 

What to conclude?

Dictation is ace! It tells us SO MUCH about the students’ listening experience. I know it’s still not popular but it has the potential to be transformative. 

Ask, ask, ask. Time discussing how they came to their answers is time well spent.