Dictation and decoding

A long time ago I did a Diploma in TEFL and I remember a particular piece of feedback I was given after one of my observed lessons. In this lesson, I’d dictated a series of words to the students. Now, I can’t remember exactly what those words were or why I was dictating them, but I do remember my tutor saying it was ‘unfair’ on students to dictate words they didn’t already know . At the time, that seemed like a pretty reasonable thing to say and for many years after that, I didn’t really do any dictations of that nature again! 

Unfortunately, this can sometimes be the power of training. Of course, on occasion, what are basically rules to teach by may be given, but to be fair to my tutor, I think I probably just interpreted his comment as criticism and then turned it into a rule all by myself! This isn’t helped by the fact that I’ve forgotten the context or the discussion we had. Maybe he asked me why I’d done what I did and maybe I didn’t have an answer. Maybe the tutor asked how the task fitted with theories of learning or theories of listening or talked about my beliefs and his own. Or maybe he didn’t. Unfortunately, without that context and without framing discussions within broader theories and beliefs, we can easily end up restricting ourselves and advice can become fixed as dogma. As it happens, I now understand the listening process better and in particular I have a far stronger grasp of the role of decoding in that process, and so I can see good reason to dictate ‘unknown’ as well as known words. Because I am clearer about the purpose, I think I also have a better idea about when and how I might dictate words and the feedback I would give. 

So why might I do it? Well, firstly, whether students can decode words or not might be the first indication as to whether they actually know these words or not. Once we know that, it might give us chance to decide how to then deal with the items in question – whether we need to give an explanation / definition and how far we might explore usage. Secondly, from a listening and learner autonomy point of view, we might want to see how far students can identify and repeat the ‘unknown’ word in order for them to then be able to ask someone else the meaning or to look the word up in a translator / dictionary. Where students get the word wrong, we might try to show students how and why they misheard things. That might relate to an inability to hear / say particular sounds, which we could try and help students with by showing how the sounds are made. Alternatively, we might draw attention to a failure to parse out the word – in other words, students may have joined two words together because of the stream of speech. We can show other examples of how words can combine in similar ways. We can also show students a larger chunk of language where the ‘new’ word collocates or is used. 

So when and how might I dictate these ‘unknown’ words? The main way I might look to do this is by taking key words from a listening and doing the dictation before students listen to the whole text. The idea here would be to help them with decoding as it seems that students need to decode words before they are able to construct meaning of a complete text. I’d probably dictate them within a short chunk / string of words because it’s more likely that in everyday life students will hear new words within a stream of speech rather than a single words. After students have compared their ideas, I might dictate the single words to see if they had been able to separate them and to consider how they relate to what they had previously. I’m suggesting just doing this using my own voice as the teacher. However, we could also use sound editing software like Audacity to extract the chunks from the listening text and use that to dictate the phrases. This would help students tune in to the sounds of the speakers, but we might ask ourselves whether it adds enough value for the time it costs to prepare.

My first feedback would be on any phonological issues that have arisen (as above), but I also might engage with meaning of the new words. That might include short explanation / definitions and / or maybe asking questions that get students thinking about how the words might be used in a text. That’s because I think that ultimately language development is driven by vocabulary and listening is aided by knowing more of the language in the text.

You may be able to think of other stages of a lesson when you might dictate unknown words – or known ones. What’s important is to bear in mind the underlying beliefs about language and learning and to try and be clear about what kind of feedback you might need to give or how else you might exploit the task to fit with these beliefs. It seems to be that ‘unfairness’ and forming absolute rules are more likely to come about when there’s a disconnect between principles of learning and teachers’ actions and feedback.

Interested in developing decoding and language skills for listening, why not do our course Teaching Listening Better. Rather than rules, you’ll get a clear understanding of principles and lots of tasks and ideas for feedback to help you develop as a teacher.