The Effects Of Phonological Awareness,Vocabulary Knowledge,Grammatical Knowledge And Working Memory On Dictation

Dictation,a combination of input and output,has a long history in foreign language teaching and testing.Meanwhile,more and more researches show that dictation is an effective and comprehensive teaching technique.As a matter of fact,dictation is widely used in foreign language teaching in China,and it is applied to some important tests.However,most students do not have a good performance on dictation.Therefore,some researchers have devoted to the study of factors influencing dictation and they do get some useful outcomes;but it is still a mystery how these factors affect dictation,for most of the researchers just inducted these factors from the mistakes that learners had made in dictation.This study took students of a senior high school in Fuzhou,Fujian Province as the subjects,and investigated how learners’ internal factors(phonological awareness,vocabulary knowledge,grammatical knowledge,and working memory)influence dictation.Specifically,this study aimed to explore the following questions.1.Are phonological awareness,vocabulary knowledge,grammatical knowledge,and working memory related to dictation?2.Is there any difference between high-level dictation score group and low-level score group in phonological awareness,vocabulary knowledge,grammatical knowledge,and working memory?3.To what degree can phonological awareness,vocabulary knowledge,grammatical knowledge,and working memory explain the variance of the score of dictation?All the subjects took tests of phonological awareness,vocabulary knowledge,grammatical knowledge,working memory and dictation,and all the collected data were analyzed with SPSS.The main findings of this study are as follows.First,there is a significant positive relationship between the four learners’ internal factors and dictation,among which the width of vocabulary knowledge shows the highest correlation,followed by working memory capacity,phonological awareness,and grammar knowledge,while the depth of vocabulary knowledge does not show any significant positive correlation with dictation.Second,the differences between high-level dictation score group and low-level score group in these factors are significant.In other words,subjects in high-level dictation score group have better performance in phonological awareness,vocabulary knowledge,grammatical knowledge,and working memory capacity than those in low-level score group.Third,these four learners’ internal factors can respectively explain the variance of dictation scores significantly;however,when these four factors combined together the explanation power of phonological awareness and grammatical knowledge is relatively low.