Dictation

[Russell P Staub]

I, too, have resurrected dictation from pedagogical obscurity. I teach a
group of Spanish-speakers at the intermediate level of an adult ESL
program. I spend a lot of time developing their aural comprehension of
smaller units, focusing often on reduction problems that are complicated
by L1 vs. L2 grammatical and phonological differences. For
example, we were working on understanding and producing sentences in the
present perfect instead of the present in examples such as these:

1. I've been a welder for 8 years.
2. She's lived here since 1995.

Although students have heard such sentences again and again in and out of
my class, their ability to identify individual words in such utterances
is very weak, and, consequently, their production reverts back to their
L1 habit of using just the present tense. Part of this weakness is due
to phonological transfer. In #1, students can't hear the /v/ in "I've"
because of it's adjacency to /b/ (Spanish has no such distinction.)
After working with the present perfect on paper, however, a dictation of
such sentences forces students to "look for" and "hear" the /v/ which
had eluded them before. This is, in my opinion, a first step towards
more competent production of both "v" and the present perfect.
With #2, a dictation subsequent to a little grammatical work forces
students to distinguish between "is" and the less familiar "has",
hopefully with positive effects on production as well.

I haven't used dictation for much else, but I find it indispensible in
teaching phenomena such as these.

Russell Staub
CSU Sacramento, California USA
Galt Adult Education
sac4...@saclink.csus.edu

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