The primary goal of the English education is to develop communicative competence in English. English is emphasized as international relations advance and globalization continues to spread. Therefore, the aural comprehension is accepted as an important...
The primary goal of the English education is to develop communicative competence in English. English is emphasized as international relations advance and globalization continues to spread. Therefore, the aural comprehension is accepted as an important aspect of foreign language learning. Therefore, many researchers have been studying methods for developing students'listening proficiency. Particularly, the effect of the dictation as a teaching listening skill method was examined by scholars such as Oller(1972), Postovsky(1975), Sutherland(1967), and Valette(1977.)
This study attempted to find the influence of different kinds of dictation on the listening skills of the middle school students to explore the ways for more effective ways to improve the ability to listen. The dictation can be utilized in various ways and types. Currently, the types of cloze dictation and error identification which are included in most middle and high school textbooks. Therefore, finding out whether the types of dictation are effective or not, tests on each type was conducted respectively. Full dictation was also included in the experiment which is a typical existing method. Also, the students' attitude toward listening class was observed. For this study, 117 second year middle female students in K middle school in Kyungki-do were selected and they were divided into three groups: the cloze dictation group, the error identification group and the full dictation group. The experiments were conducted twice a week for a month, which totaled 8 experiments.
The main results obtained from this study are as follows. First, there was no statistically significant difference in assessment scores among groups; the types of dictation used did not affect the group's ability.
Second, the results of influence on the types of dictation to the high-level and low-level students in the three groups are as follows; there was no statistically meaningful difference for the high-level and low-level students. However, in the case of the bottom-up questions on the test, the low-level students showed statistically meaningful improvement after the cloze and error identification dictation. This showed that the cloze dictation and error identification could improve the low-level students'English listening proficiency through effective listening class. Otherwise, the full dictation didn't bring the meaningful difference for both the high-level and low-level students. Based on these results, it was proved that the partial dictation could be a good method for the low-level students to improve the English listening ability.
Third, as a result of the experiment that tried to find out a difference in the interest and attitude after the listening class according to listening studying, there was little difference in the interest. However, the low-level students showed a positive effect in general after the listening class. In case of the question about whether the partial dictation was more effective for listening ability than the full dictation, they showed a more negative attitude after the test. From the analysis of the detailed questionnaire, numerous students expressed psychological pressure when they had to dictate what they listened to in every class and the students also had difficulty in writing the letters of words they didn't know. Therefore, it is needed to conduct dictation with the consideration for the degree of difficulty and the interest of students.
Based on above results, the implications of this study for the educational field of English listening in Korea are as follows;
First, the types of dictation can be diversified for the improvement of English listening ability for learners. This study confirmed that the various types of dictation can be utilized for developing the listening comprehension as well as the full dictation.
Second, it was proved that cloze dictation and error identification were more effective for the low-level students than the full dictation. The cloze dictation and error identification were also effective for the high-level students, but the degree of improvement was less prominent than that of low-level students. Therefore, the cloze dictation and error identification can be positively used for the low-level students as a way of improving the listening ability. The results revealed the top-down test items affected the advanced-level students positively.
Thus, it has been confirmed that the full dictation regarding top-down test items can be an effective method to improve listening competence of the advanced learners.
According to the above results, it was proved that the different types of dictation can be applied according to the levels of the listening learners. However, the experiments were conducted with the limited types of dictation, so the results of this thesis cannot be generalized as all types of dictation. Therefore, when the dictation is conducted, the effort for the more effective listening instruction is needed through the various trainings with the degree of length, difficulty and types. In addition, there should be more studies on the concrete methods of using dictation for the improvement of listening ability in English education.