How To Improve Listening Comprehension Of Students In High School By Sentence Dictation

This thesis develops the idea of improving listening comprehension by increasing sentence dictation, while decreasing word dictation in Senior High Schools. It states that it is necessary and practical to standardize the training approach of sentence dictation.The presentation was written after studying the relevant literature, doing the sentence dictation experiment, interviewing, questioning and collecting some first-hand information.Chapter One shows the listening comprehension aims of Senior High Schools designed by the Chinese Education Department, reveals severe problems to exist in current teaching and learning. Chapter Two reviews the historical development of dictation and narrates that dictation existed early as a test and teaching training means, but it always remains a matter for debate. It also reveals the relationshipbetween dictation and listening comprehension, and gives all kinds of dictations: standard dictation, partial dictation, dictation with interfering noise, dictation & composition, elicited imitation and modern dictation. It emphasizes sentence dictation which is derived from standard dictation. Chapter Three analyzes and lists differences between English and Chinese thinking pattern. English thinking pattern goes from the general to the specific. Chinese thinking pattern, on the other hand, argues the opposite..., and continually analyzes it-sentence pattern, inversion pattern, subjunctive mood, negative pattern and some idiomatic expressions. Chapter Four describes the whole process of the sentence dictation experiment and its results, analyses the experiment with dictation theories introduced above, concludes that sentence dictation is really more effective than word dictation, especially for understanding the details of a text. Chapter Five gives some suggestions that the English teachers should pay special attention to the followingpoints, namely reading times, reading speed of dictation, the best dictation intervaland checking time.