The Role of Listening Comprehension in Dictation

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Indian Journal of Science and Technology Vol. 5 No. 8 (August 2012) ISSN: 0974- 6846

Sci.Technol.Edu. Listening comprehension P.Habibi et al.

Indian Society for Education and Environment (iSee) http://www.indjst.org Indian J.Sci.Techno

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The role of listening comprehension in dictationParyaHabibi

1,AzadehNemati

2*andSharminHabibi

3

1YoungResearchersClub,IslamicAzadUniversity,SanandajBranch,Sanandaj,Iran

2DepartmentofEnglishlanguageteaching,Jahrombranch,IslamicAzadUniversity,Jahrom,Iran,

3

YoungResearchersClub,IslamicAzadUniversity,SanandajBranch,Sanandaj,[email protected], [email protected]*, [email protected]

AbstractAcursory lookatmoststudentsinKurdistanisampletoshowthat theroleof listeningcomprehension indictation,asanintegralpartoflanguagelearning,hasoftenbeenoverlookedinthedevelopmentofEFLcurriculum.Toconductthestudy80 studentswereselectedfromIslamicAzadUniversity,SanandajBranch.TheyweredividedintogroupsAandBandwere taught dictationin two differentways.ForgroupA itwas done traditionallywhilefor groupB itwas inaccordancewith processing listening comprehension and improving listening. The resultofANCOVArevealedthagroupBleadstohigherperformanceindictation.Keywords : Listeningcomprehension,Dictation,Standarddictation,Trans-dictation,Dicto-comp.Introduction

It is believed that teaching a foreign language anddictation is not limited to learning vocabularies andstructures. Having discussed the importance of comprehension and listening the questions of how toteachdictation inEFL situations is raised.According toCelce - Murcia etal.(1997)therearetwobasictypesofstudent responses in listening exercises: A) Thequestion-oriented response model that is students areasked to listen to an oraltext, then answer a series offactualcomprehensionquestions onthecontent,B)Thetask- orientedresponsemodelthatisstudentsmakeuseoftheinformationprovidedin thespoken text,notasanend in itself but as a resource to use. The study oflistening comprehension becomes a polestar of secondlanguage theory building research and pedagogy

(Anderson&Lynch,1988).Up to know, comprehension based approaches to

instructionmayvarymightilyinhoweducatortrytorenderthe listening comprehension; they are similar in theirlessened emphasized on formal dictation analysis.Listeningcomprehensionhasattractedtheleastattentionamongall thedictations,in termsof both theamountofresearch conducted on the text and the neglect that itsuffered in most student programs. For a languagelearnertobeaproficientpartnerinanydictation,needtobe skillful at both comprehension and listening, so inordertomakethestudentsbemorecompetentinwritingskillsof language, course designers havedevotedmostoftheirtimetogeneratingexercisesonteachinglisteningandcomprehensionintandem.Rivers(1981)pointsoutthat the lack of attention to listening has no scientificreasons.Chastain (1988)asserts thatbecause listeningisanunobservableandabstractprocess,itisoverlookedby teachers. It is believed that listening process iscurrentlygainingattention asamajorareaofinterestintheliteratureofsecond/foreignlanguagelearning(Bacon,1989;Johnson,1995).

Listening comprehension enables learners tofunction successfully in second language community.Celce-MurciaandMcIntosh(1981)believethattheaimof

listeningcomprehension is tomakelearnersunderstandthelanguageusedbynativespeakers.Theybelievethain language teaching and learning, the importanprinciples that determine the norms of appropriatelanguage use within the framework of the listeningrepresentcomprehension.

Chauldron and Richards (1986) make a distinctionbetweenthetwoprocessesinlistening:namely,bottom-up and top-down. Bottom-up processing: the use oincoming data as a reference of information about themeaning of a message and comprehension processbegins with the message received until the intendedmeaningisarrivedat.Top-downprocessingistheuseobackgroundknowledge inunderstanding the meaningoamessage.Infactthebulkofresearchsincethemid-90hasespeciallyfocusedonfindingvariousforeign/second

language instruction methods to integrate dictationinstruction within a listening framework. Pursuing thistrend, many researchers have attempted to define theteachercenterapproachtoexplicitdictationinstruction.

Regarding dictation, Parrot (1993) suggests thalistening isa very valuable source of dictationpracticeDictationcanbeusedasbothawritingpracticewhentheteacheriswillingtoemployaprocedureforreproductionandasalisteningpracticewhenhe/shewantstomakestudentslistenwithattentionasmuchastheycan,sothatthey would write down what they have heard. Chiang(1995) stated that dictation should be substituted fomanyotherlanguages.Listeninghasbeenattheheartothe debate in dictation and subject to controversy anddiscussionamongresearchersofthefieldforatleast40years.

Dictation is divided into five groups, includingstandard dictation, partial dictation, elicited imitationdicto-comp,anddictationwithcompetingnoise.Standarddictation,definedasapassageofappropriatelengthanddifficulty. The passage is read, and then studentswritedownwhattheyhearandthen thestudentsgettheresulofpassage.Second they listen to the passage inpartsand write down what they get. Third, in the partiadictation,apassagewithsomedeletedsectionisgiven,


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and then reading entirely.The students listenand fill inthe deletedparts.Forth thestudentslistenand imitationin elicited imitation, Fifth Dicto-comp is used whenstudents listen to a passage andwrite down what theyhave comprehended. Sixth in dictation with competing

noise,hearingwhenanextranoiseisin thebackground.Thesubjectsareexpectedtoknowthepassage.Seventhin trans-dictation, a passage is read loudly, and thestudentstranslateitintheirnativetongues.Inallkindsofdictation,comprehensionisunavoidableskill.

Thereisnoexplicit relationshipbetweenlisteningandspecialization of knowledge in dictation. Chaudron andRichards (1986) enumerate several factors that canhinder listening comprehension, such as of personalinternal factors, inattentiveness, personal disinterest inthe topic,etc.(Fig.1).

Intheprocessofdictation,oneaspectthatemergesasa topicofdiscussion is the relationship between thelisteningcomprehensionandthedictationfromwhichthat

language is originated. Most scholars focus oncomprehension asan integral part of dictation learning.Therefore,thefollowinghypothesiswasmade.Doeslisteningcomprehensioninstructionaffectdictationscoreofexperimentalgroupcomparingcontrolgroup?

Purpose of the studyThis paper isanattempt to investigate the placeof

listeningcomprehensionindictationofEFLlearnersandsee whether the instruction of listening can improvedictation. In other words this study is to help IranianstudentsasEFL learners tohavebettercomprehensionofwhatisheard.

As Chastain (1988) states, one of the most crucialresponsibilities of the teacher is toarouse the students'interest in the content of the listening comprehension.Hence,thecentraltopicofthisstudyisthatthestudentscan improve their listening ability if they are dictated

something in which they are interested andcomprehended.Participants

The participants of this study were 80 sophomoreIranianEFLlearnersof IslamicAzadUniversity,Sananda

Branch. The participants were selected randomly fromamong those intact classes which had general EnglishThen they were divided into control and experimentagroups randomly. The students of group A (controlconsistedof37EFLstudentsandgroupB(experimentalhad43EFLstudents.Procedure

IngroupA, dictationwas taughttraditionally;that isthe teacher was able tohit thetarget and deadcenterUnlikegroupAinwhichstudentsplaythemostimportantroles in learning dictation, in group B students wererequiredtolistentotheteachersexplicitexplanationonthe new comprehension and then do somedecontextualizedexercisesindividually.

In this approach, students are provided withcomprehensible texts, which include certain listening.Thesetextswouldactasatriggerforthestudentshigherorder thinking patterns to start practicing. They arerequired to read and process the given passages andtherebycomeupwiththeirowngeneralizationsabouttheStandard dictation. This way, students are actuallyinvolved in a problem-solving procedure whereby theylook at eachtextas aproblemto be solved in order tocomprehend the idea of the passage and reach at aconclusionconcerning.

In other words, they have to produce the newdictationmechanically without receiving sufficient input

Treatment lasted for a whole semester. At the end, adirectedwriting task was given to the students of bothgroups to see how well they could utilize the dictationthey had been taught. This dictation task had threereasons:

Firstly, eliciting writing dictation from the studentsandsecondly,itwasdevisedtohelpthemexpresstheirideaaboutthecourse;thatistheirreflectiononlistening.Students dictationwere corrected on the basis ofESLComposition Profile taken from Testing ESLComposition: A Practical Approach by Jacobs et al.,1981, p. 30. Thirdly, these technical terms are likely topose the least threat to learners as most of words arerandomlyusedandthepercentageofthetechnicalterms

toestimatecomprehensiondrastically.ResultsTable1representsmeansandstandarddeviationsof

thedictationexamfor2groupsofcasesinpre- andpost-tests. The traditionalgroup(groupA)meanwas 14.5 inthepre-testandincreasedto15.32inthepost-test.Inthemoderngroup(groupB)thedictationmeanwas14.34inthepre-testand increasedto16.80in thepost-test.Theincreasing in dictation scores in the moderngroupwashigherthaninthetraditionalgroup.

Fig.1.Theinterrelationofcomprehension,listeningcomprehensionanddictation


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Equivalence of two groups dictation means in the

pre-test was examined by the independent t-test. Theresult(t=0.306,df=98,p=0.761>0.05) indicatedthattherewasnosignificantdifferencebetween2groupsinthepre-test.

Theeffectsofpre-testanddifferenttrainingmethodswere analyzed based on the analysis of covariance(ANCOVA) and presented in Table 2. The results ofANCOVAindicate that therewasasignificant (p

The Role of Listening Comprehension in Dictation

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