An Empirical Study On The Effect Of Standard Dictation On English Listening Proficiency

Listening,as one of the receptive skills,is the pre-condition for successful communication.In English language teaching,listening enables learners to receive language input and facilitate the emergence of other language skills.Therefore,many scholars have conducted research on the technique in listening teaching.Among them,great attention has been paid to the research on the effect of standard dictation on students' English listening proficiency.The subjects in these researches,however,are mostly elementary EFL learners,English majors and postgraduates.Few studies took non-English majors as subjects.Selecting non-English majors at Chang'an University,this study investigated the effect of standard dictation on students' listening proficiency and its effect on students at different listening proficiency levels.An experiment was conducted among 53 students in both the experimental(N=26)and control group(N=27)which started the experiment with the same listening level through a pre-test(PETS3).18 standard dictation materials have been dictated to students in the experimental group for 9 weeks before both groups took a post-test.By analyzing mean scores,standard deviation,independent-samples t-test and paired-samples t-test,the present study achieved two results:(1)Standard dictation could augment slightly non-English majors' overall listening proficiency.Among the overall listening proficiency,standard dictation had a little positive impact on short dialogue listening proficiency,whereas for the listening proficiency of long dialogue and monologue,standard dictation had little or no influence.(2)For low proficiency level students,standard dictation appeared to augment moderately their overall listening proficiency.Specifically speaking,standard dictation had a temperately positive impact on short dialogue listening proficiency while standard dictation's influence on long dialogue and monologue listening proficiency was not significant.For high proficiency level students,however,standard dictation did not seem to influence as moderately as low proficiency level students.Its effect was not significant on the listening proficiency of all the overall,short dialogue,long dialogue and monologue.These research results revealed that: Teachers could make good use of standard dictation to improve their listening teaching efficiency in the classroom and enrich classroom activities,particularly for low proficiency level students to improve their overall and short dialogue listening proficiency.Nevertheless,the present study has a limited number and range of subjects;the time span of the experiment may not be long enough,and students' extra-curriculum study are not taken into consideration.Further research could be carried out on the relationship between other forms of dictation and listening proficiency,on the basis of considering other variables that may have an effect on students' listening proficiency.