In this post I’m going to talk about the new dictation task in the GCSE, and why i think it has the potential to be very powerful. I was inspired by my year 11 German group, so these examples are going to be in German, but I’ve translated them and where relevant, told you how the words would sound.
Our mocks started last week, and in our last lesson before mocks I felt it was important to work on the dictation task ahead of their listening exam. I have a sense that the new listening exam has been made much easier than the previous incarnation of the GCSE, which has a number of consequences. One of them is that the dictation task at the end of the exam, which carries 8 marks at foundation and 10 marks at higher, will become a key discriminator between grades. In a lot of ways it’s one of the hardest elements in the exam to gain full marks on, so it was time to give it some serious attention.
I used the end-of-theme dictation tests out of our textbook (the OUP / Kerboodle one), but I asked the students to show me their answers on mini whiteboards so I could instantly get a good sense of their own processing and common issues within the class of 24 students. Then I did my best to categorise the errors, and ended up with three groups. They were:
Vocabulary
New sounds / letter-sound-links
Phonics meets grammar.
The vocabulary is the most straightforward to pick out, assess and remedy. In this category a students had misspelled words that they could clearly identify within the track, and the strong implication was that this was because they simply didn’t know them. For example the word ‘später’, meaning ‘later’ was spelled ‘speter’ and ‘späte’ - both orthographically accurate - but the incorrect spelling was tell-tale to me that they had not recognised the word. I could check that by asking them, and urge them to do more vocabulary learning. (Incidentally I have Memrise courses on the 500 commonest words in French, German and Spanish - ask me for the link if you would like to use them!)
New sounds or letter-sound links was a category that arose where I noticed that students struggled with the spelling of sounds that don’t exist in English, or which are spelled dramatically differently in English. The umlaut causes issues in this regard in German - and to a lesser extent the e acute - é - in French. When practising the difference between u and ü, even some of my most able students identified a key issue in their own learning: that they could hear the difference when isolated, but within a word it became much more difficult.
The biggest issue, though, was what I called ‘phonics meets grammar’. This is something I found repeatedly during my PhD, and in a way it’s gratifying to start to see examples in the learning of German in year 11 as well, because it suggests it might be more universal than my doctoral sample. In other words, when there is fuzzy understanding of what has been heard, a student will tend to write what they’ve heard, without much concern for the sense of what they’ve written. (I suspect this is a cognitive overload thing, but if so, we need to find ways to train them to analyse the sense of what they write as they write it!) For example, there was confusion between the words ‘wir’ (we, pronounced ‘veer’) and the word ‘vier’ (four, pronounced ‘fear’) - and that confusion persisted even if the resulting sentence was meaningless (‘we eat chocolate’ or ‘four eat chocolate’). Another, more subtle example, was differentiating between ‘Freundin’ (girlfriend) or ‘Freunden’ (friends, in the dative plural). The phrase that was heard was ‘meine Freundin hat’ (my girlfriend has). In grammar terms, the use of the verb ‘hat’ in the third person singular means that ‘Freunden’ is an impossible option, but this was overlooked by many students.
Classroom practice
Use of mini-whiteboards was really powerful here - far more than asking students to write in their books and correct each others. Because once i had isolated the issues, I could use them as ‘hinge points’ in the lesson to briefly go off on tangents and come up with similar examples. It allowed me as a teacher to do the classic of rapidly sythesising the issues that I could see in the classroom in order to move the learning on.
Dictation washback has the potential to be powerful!
There’s not a lot of love for the dictation task in the new exam, and I recognise that. However, I think that it has powerful potential for washback (backwash!) and if harnessed well, improvement in listening skills from year seven. The line of least resistance might well be just to ‘do’ dictation in class, give the students the correct form, self-mark, move on. This is reflective of how much we tend to ‘do’ listening in class without a lot of analysis of ‘how did you get to that answer’ - which, admittedly, can be time-consuming, and time is not something we have a lot of! Instead, I would urge teachers to drop in a few mini-whiteboard dictation tasks and attempt to put errors into categories, and ideally keep some notes on examples of common mistakes, in order that they can pre-empt them the next time. These notes could even be kept on a joint departmental file to be shared within a department.
As well as the categories I noted above, a key one to look out for might be ‘finding the gaps between words’ - known as segmentation in applied linguistics. Segmentation issues need digging into as they will probably indicate a coming-together of vocabulary, grammar and phonics (‘man muss sich entspannen’ (one must relax) transcribed as ‘Mein Musik entspannen’ (my music to relax)).
So I urge you, sometime before half term, have a go at this with all classes from year 7 to year 13. Give it three or four sentences and think about the nature of the errors. This is a way of us learning to listen to our students: and in responding to it we can really help them learn to listen to French, German or Spanish!
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