On Pragmatic Dictation And Its Application To EFLT In China

Dictation has been employed as a language teaching and testing device for several hundreds of years, and theoretically it has always been regarded as useful. But someempirical studies did not reach any agreement on the effect of dictation practice. The present study intends to investigate the effect of systematic classroom dictation practice on the language skills of EFL students in China.The subjects of my study consist of 65 first-year English majors. They came from different districts of Shandong province and were enrolled in Foreign Language School of Shandong Normal University during the fall semester of 2002. They were actually from two intact classes which I myself taught them the course of listening comprehension. The 28 students in Class One were taken as a controlled group (CG) while the 37 students in Class Two were taken as an experimental group (EG), which received the dictation practice during the following 20 weeks. Both of the two groups took part in a pretest and a posttest which were carried out respectively before and after the experiment. Besides, immediately after the posttest all the subjects were asked to complete a questionnaire including questions about their attitudes towards dictation, the way in which they take a dictation and the factors that might influence the precise interpretation of the dictated materials in written form.Test items included in both pretest and posttest are listening comprehension, reading, vocabulary, grammar and cloze. The result of the pretest showed that the English proficiency of the two groups were similar. At the end of the semester, a posttest was conducted. The result of it showed that the two groups were significantly different in terms of grammar and no significant difference in listening, reading, vocabulary and cloze is revealed. The reasons why dictation promotes the acquisition of grammar are discussed. In addition, pedagogical implications are drawn from the present study with some strategies for the teachers' reference in their classroom teaching and the recommended newly created types of dictation.The thesis consists of 5 chapters:Chapter One reviews the major research work that has been done by researchers on the issue of taking dictation as language teaching and testing device and discusses the position of dictation in the circles of language teaching and testing throughout the history. In addition, the relationship between dictation and pragmatic test is stated and some tentative analysis of the psychological process is also described.Chapter Two focuses on the methodology of the present case study, introducing the subjects, procedures and experimental instruments, etc.Chapter Three reports the analysis and discussion on the results of the experiment.Chapter Four includes the pedagogic implications drawn from the results of the experiment. Some strategies are put forward so as to help teachers utilize dictation practice in a more effective way. Several newly created types of dictation, which are believed to be more communicative and easier to be adopted in class, are recommended.Chapter Five concludes the whole thesis while pointing out some of the limitations of the experiment.