Thoughts on Dictation

 The new GCSE is going to include a Dictation test as part of the listening exam. This is in order to test pupils' knowledge of the sound-spelling link and make sure we are all explicitly teaching phonics.

The immediate red flag is, of course, FRENCH!!!!! French, with its silent letters and redundant grammatical endings which occur in the written form but not in the spoken form. Dictation has been a staple of schooling for French children, already fluent, but struggling to learn to spell.

So the sentence

les petits garçons mangent de magnifiques gâteaux

has six markers for plural in the written form, but only one (les) in the spoken form. Knowing to add the various endings s / x / ent is nothing to do with the sound spelling link. It is a grammar test.

From the perspective of a sound-spelling link test, would it be acceptable to transcribe the sentence like this?

les petit garçon mange de magnifique gâteau

The grammar is wrong, but the sounds are transcribed correctly.

Or what about this?

Le petit garçon mange de magnifiques gâteaux.

This one is grammatically consistent, but they mis-transcribed the le/les at the start.

What if they wrote something like this?

lait petit garce ont mens-je deux magne y fit que gatte eau

It's complete nonsense, but a good effort at transcription.

This may well be a nightmare for the exam boards. And looking at how they intend to mark the dictation task in terms of what is acceptable (sound/meaning/grammar) may well be one of the criteria for choosing one exam board over another.

I'm going to leave that to the exam boards to panic over for now. And start with what I CAN do to get stuck in to dictation.

So far, I have come across several interesting things to tackle:

1. How much French can pupils process?

2. What is the interaction between sound and meaning?

3. Grammar?

So I find that if I give pupils a blank piece of paper and read a sentence to them, they find it very hard. By the end of the first word, I have protests that they can't be writing the first word and simultaneously listening to the rest of the sentence.

There are two solutions to this. One would be to dictate single words as in a traditional spelling test. The other would be to have pens down, listen to the whole sentence, then attempt to write the parts you could make sense of. And fill in the gaps in a second reading. Pupils find this very difficult, but that's not a reason not to work on it.

This approach brings in the dimension of processing meaning. It is impossible to hold a whole sentence in the mind as a sequence of sounds to be rendered into written form. To hold the sentence in your head, you have to process the meaning. So for pupils, the process is not just one of transcribing sounds. It is: listen and understand, probably translating into English, then write the sentence in French, probably translating back from English into French. So a separate listening task and then writing task.

Once we understand that the second half of the dictation process is a writing task, this is where the need to tackle grammar comes in. So a pupil has to decide whether the sentence they are writing requires the form aller/allez/allé/allée/allés/allées, for example.

Here are some thoughts on how to tackle this. Some I have tried and some I will be trying:

Instead of a blank piece of paper, give the pupils options to pick:

je peux faire les magasins / je préfère les magasins - the teacher reads one of the options and the pupils have to listen for which one is actually said. This puts the attention onto the sounds. But when I have tried this, the lure of meaning is still strong. With this exact example, pupils wrongly went for I prefer despite what they heard. This seems to be because they were more familiar with les magasins as a noun than in the expression faire les magasins and so picked the one that made most sense to them. It is possible for your brain to be totally convinced that you have heard something that wasn't actually said. There's a listening from the Expo textbook that says, "Dans ma chambre" but once you hear it as saying "Donald Trump", it's impossible to un-hear it.

Instead of a blank piece of paper, give a sentence to modify:

I use a whole sentence rather than a sentence with gaps in. For example, pupils have a printed sentence like:

J'aime aller au cinéma avec mes amis

and they hear a variation with one word different. First they listen and identify which word has changed. Then on a second listening, they write in the new word correctly. This works much better than a sentence with a gap to be filled. The printed sentence is supposed to support the pupils' understanding and reduce the cognitive load of meaning, listening, remembering, processing, spelling. This reduction of cognitive load is not as effective if the sentence we give them already has a gap in it. It makes it much harder for pupils to work out than we might think when a vital part of the sentence is missing!

Give them a printed sentence in English:

The pupils have a sentence printed such as

I would like to take the bus into town

Then the teacher dictates the sentence in French. Pupils are not struggling with the meaning, because that is given to them in English. It recognises that Dictation is a dual task, and focuses on the second part: writing the sentence in French. In this case the dictated sentence helps and supports their writing. Pupils can feel as if they are being given the answer rather than panicked over having to write down what they hear. This feels like a positive perspective on dictation and I will be giving it a go!

Make processing writing a two stage process:

The teacher reads the sentence in French. But asks the pupils to write down exactly what it means in English. Then the pupils translate their English sentence into French, supported by hearing the sentence again a second time in French. I haven't tried this. I will give it a go and see how it works. It may be an over complication. Or it may be taking apart exactly the process that pupils have to go through in order to be successful.

Tackle grammar explicitly:

We need to talk to pupils about the way one slight change in sound changes other words in a sentence.

grande vache noire mange sounds exactly the same as grandes vaches noires mangent

We teach this grammar. But do we teach that it all depends on whether the first word you hear is la or les? And practise picking up on this? So we need to make dictation a tool we use in grammar teaching. Before we get to the stage of finding grammar is an issue when we try to do dictations.

I think the key is going to be focusing on what the specific demands are. In any given practise task (or test), do we want pupils to:

correctly spell known words, keep sounds in their head, process meaning, translate into English and back again, attempt unknown words, apply knowledge of grammar... ?

As we become more aware of the actual demands involved in dictation, we will be able to target the skills required, hopefully with more and more success.

Note I haven't even got into the teaching of phonics here! I'm a great advocate of explicit teaching of the sound-spelling link. One of my very first posts was on exactly this! Phonics, the basis for everything.