An Empirical Study Of The Effect Of Standard Dictation On Listening Skill Of Non-english Major Post-graduates

Listening,as one of the basic language skills,is a pre-condition for successful communication.In English language teaching,listening skill enables learners to receive language input and facilitate the development of other language skills.Therefore,many scholars have conducted research on the listening technique.Great attention has been paid to the effect of standard dictation on students' English listening ability.The subjects in these researches,however,are mostly elementary EFL(English as a foreign language)learners and English majors.Few studies took non-English postgraduate students as the subjects.Selecting non-English postgraduate students at Shanghai Normal University(SHNU),this study investigated the effect of standard dictation on listening skill,and its effect at different listening proficiency levels.61 subjects(whose English levels is above CET 4 but below CET 6)were divided into the experiment group(EG,31)and the control group(CG,30).At the beginning of the experiment,both the experimental group and the control group participated in the pretest(TOEFL listening test).Through the pre-test,31 students in the experimental group were divided into 15 higher-level students and 16 lower-level students,and 30 students in the control group were divided into 10 higher-level students and 10 lower-level students.The experimental group received standard dictation training(16 standard dictation passages)within 16 weeks and participated in the post-test with the control group(another TOEFL listening test).By analyzing mean scores,standard deviation,independent-samples t-test and pairedsamples t-test,the present study gets the following results:(1)Standard dictation is effective in improving non-English major postgraduates' overall listening skill.(2)For low proficiency level students,standard dictation considerably improves their overall listening skill.For high proficiency level students,however,standard dictation does not improve as much as low proficiency level students.Some advanced level students even experienced degeneracy in their listening competence.(3)In terms of the overall listening skill,standard dictation has positive impact both on short dialogue and long monologue listening skill,and for the listening proficiency of long monologue,standard dictation has more influence.(4)Standard dictation can help improve students' bottomup listening strategy by clarifying the details in the listening materials.These present research reveals that teachers could make good use of standard dictation to improve teaching efficiency and enrich classroom activities,particularly for low proficiency level students.Due to that the present study has a limited sample size,the time span of the experiment may not be long enough,and students' extra-curriculum study are hard to control.Future researches can be carried out with large sample,whether other variables have an effect on students' listening skill or not also can be explored.