1
VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES 2
VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI

HANOI, 2010 6
TABLE OF CONTENTS

CANDIDATE’S STATEMENT
i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ii
ABSTRACT
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
iv
LIST OF TABLES
vii
LIST OF CHARTS
viii
PART A: INTRODUCTION
1
1. Rationale of the study
1
2. Aims of the study
2
3. Scope of the study
3
4. Methods of the study

11
1.2.6. Disadvantages of dictation
12
CHAPTER 2: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
13
7
2.1. An overview of the research site
13
2.2. Research questions
13
2.3. The participants
14
2.4. The instruments
14
2.5. Data collection procedures
15
2.6. Data analysis
16
2.7. Summary
16
CHAPTER 3: DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION
17
3.1. Analysis and discussion of dictations for listening skill improvement
17
3.1.1. Analysis and discussion of dictations with the T/F statement task
17
3.1.2. Analysis and discussion of dictations with gap-filling task

43
REFERENCES
44
APPENDICES
I
Appendix 1: Survey questionnaire for teachers
I
Appendix 2: Pre-test
IV
Appendix 3: Progress test 1
VI
8
Appendix 4: Progress test 2
VIII
Appendix 5: Post-test
X
Appendix 6: Keys for practice tasks
XII

Table 6: Listening practice task for dictation 6
Table 7: Listening practice task for dictation 7
Table 8: Listening practice task for dictation 8
Table 9: Teachers‟ opinion of dictation as a useful teaching technique
Table 10: Teachers‟ frequency of the application of dictation
Table 11: Application of dictation in different stages of a listening lesson
Table 12: Teachers‟ attention to the content of dictation
Table 13: Teachers‟ opinion of speech speed of dictation
Table 14: Teachers‟ opinion of accent
Table 15: Result distribution of Pre-tests
Table 16: Result distribution of Progress tests 1
Table 17: Result distribution of Progress tests 2
Table 18: Result distribution of Post-tests

10
LIST OF CHARTS

Chart 1: Result description of pre-test


Language is the most important thing for people as a means of communication. It is
basically a means of both spoken and written communication. People use language to
express their ideas and wishes to other people such as when they need others help so that
close relation among members of the group can be carried out (Ramelan, 1993:8). Ramelan
further states that “the use of language enables the members of a social group to cooperate
with one another for their own benefit.” It is important to learn English because it is an
international language which is used in many countries over the world and widely used in
many sectors such as information, trade, aviation, science, education, etc. In Vietnam, the
importance of English has been realized because English is considered to play a crucial
role on the path of industrialization and modernization of the country as well as on the way
of regional and international integration. Therefore, English is now taught in all levels of
schools all over the country in order that the students are familiar with English and can use
and communicate in English well.

Of all four skills: speaking, listening, reading and writing, listening is always
considered to be the most difficult for teachers to teach and for students to improve
themselves, which leads to the fact that most learners have low level of proficiency in their
listening skill. In fact, in the process of teaching and learning English, listening plays an
important role since it involves various kinds of learners‟ knowledge and it is closely
related to other skills, especially speaking skill. While, G (1998) pointed out that “being a
good listener involves collaborating with speakers and taking an active role in asking for
clarification when you do not understand”. Later on, the ability to understand the native
speakers in face-to-face communication, on the radio or tape may be important for learners
to further study the language and communicate in it.

At Tan Yen High School N
0
2 where I have been working, like at many other high
schools in Vietnam, English has been a compulsory subject for many years. However, the

improve listening skill for grade-10 students at Tan Yen High School N
0
2. Therefore, the
study is conducted to aim at finding the answers to the following questions:
1. How is dictation designed to improve listening skill for the students?
2. How is dictation used to improve listening skill for the students?
3. How much are the students‟ listening skills improved after the application of
dictation? 13
3. Scope of the study

Due to the limited time and financial constraint, I am unable to carry the
investigation on a large scale. Therefore, within an M.A. minor thesis, my intention is only
to investigate the effectiveness of dictation to enhance listening skill for grade-10 students
(about 80 students in total) at Tan Yen High School N
0
2. For the aims of convenience, I
have chosen 2 classes of grade-10 students who I have been teaching to be my research
site. Also, it is my intention to conduct a survey on three teachers of English of the school
who have been teaching grade-10 students.

4. Methods of the study

To achieve the aims of the study, I am going to use both quantitative and qualitative
methods including survey questionnaires for teachers and listening tests for students.

research topic such as definition of listening, listening as the final goal of learning a
language, listening as a means of acquiring language, and evaluation standard on listening
skill. Furthermore, the followings are also included in this chapter: history of dictation,
definition of dictation, characteristics of dictation, types of dictation, and so on.

Chapter III describes the method of investigation which consists of research site,
research questions, participants, instruments, methods of data collection and analysis.

Chapter IV, Data analysis and Discussion, gives a detailed presentation of data and
a detailed description of data analysis. Some explanations and interpretations of the
findings of the study are also presented.

Chapter V presents conclusions of the research, limitations and suggestions for
further researches.

In the last part of the study, to assure that the study is really valid, the researcher
gives references and appendices. 15
PART B: DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER 1: REVIEW OF LITERATURE

Any study should have theories as its background. In this minor thesis, the


16
1.1.2. Listening as the final goal of learning a language

According to Donoghue (1975:76), listening occupies the basic portion in the
context of the language arts and progress in reading, speaking and writing is directly
governed by listening ability. It is the most important of the four arts since nearly half of
the adult working day and more than half of the child‟s classroom activity time is spent on
listening. Moreover, the students can gain a lot of experiences of listening to a wide variety
of samples of spoken English, like watching films and plays or listening to the radio or
songs. It also helps the students know different varieties of language such as standard or
regional, formal or informal language and different text types like conversation, narrative
or informative types. Furthermore, students, day by day, can practice and sharpen their
listening skill and they can flexibly listen to everything. Therefore, listening is regarded to
be among the most important educational goals. It provides students with a stimulus for
other activities such as discussion, reading and writing, which are the main language skills.

1.1.3. Listening as a mean of acquiring language

“Listening to spoken language is an important way of acquiring the language of
picking up structures and vocabularies”, Adrian Doff (1995:199). It is obvious that
developing the ability to understand the spoken foreign language is along continuous
process and listening is a skill that must be taught and that does not happen automatically.
If the students learn to listen effectively, they are able to understand, to interpret, to
evaluate and to respond to what they hear. Thus, it is important for students to develop the
ability to understand spoken language. In daily life, they can watch English programs on
T.V, listen to the radio or have face-to-face conversations with native speakers. Thus the
more frequent learners are exposed to the language, the faster and more easily they can
acquire it.


1.2. General concepts of dictation
1.2.1. History of dictation across second/foreign language methodologies

Dictation is a type of exercise that was introduced in the Middle Age, at a time
when pedagogical resources were limited to the teacher‟s voice and writing. In fact, it did
not much matter how well students wrote as long as they grasped the meaning. It was used
to teach the structure (morphology and syntax) of the language in the Grammar/translation
method and for teaching sounds and spellings in the traditional direct method. It
18
disappeared with audio-lingual and audio-visual methods but recently when
methodologists have been advocating more integrative methods, there‟s been an attempt at
reviving the exercise and introducing different types of dictations. Moreover, dictation has
also been getting much support from methodologists and linguistics when it is used as
language teaching device.

1.2.2. Definition of dictation

Dictation is a widely researched device of language teaching. It is useful when well
integrated with the teaching activities. It is a teaching technique which has proved
extremely effective at all levels of instruction. It ensures attentive listening, trains students
to distinguish sounds, enables students to learn to transfer oral sounds to written symbols,
helps to develop aural comprehension and assists in self-evaluation.

Several experts gave their statements about dictation that are very useful for
teachers. For example, Oller (1979: 39) states that: “Dictation is a task which requires the
processing of temporally constrained sequences of material in the language, divided up the
stream of speech and then refers down what is heard requires understanding the meaning

of the students are working, even in a very large class.
(2) Dictation ensures attentive listening. When the students are doing a dictation,
their attention will totally be focused on the exercises.
(3) Dictation gives the students a chance to get practice in the sort of note taking
that many courses require. This is a very important part of the students‟ needs in using
language.
(4) Dictation requires the students to make the transfer from the spoken to written
language. The written record proves their ability to reproduce spoken language in a correct
visual form.
(5) Dictation, if properly varied, can provide practice in listening comprehension,
vocabulary building, increasing reading speed and comprehension, as well as elementary
aspects of hand-writing, punctuation, spelling, and composition formation. Certain types of
dictation also lend themselves to the grammar class, and train the students to distinguish
sounds and grammatical elements. 20
1.2.4. Types of dictation

As a language teaching and learning technique, dictation may be given in various
types. There are several types of dictation. According to Sawyer and Silver (1961), they
are as follows:

The first, the phonemic item dictation, consists of the teacher presenting the


Dictation has been used in language teaching and learning for several hundred
years, and methodologists have often made pedagogical claims for its value. Lado says that
dictation is favoured by many teachers and students both as a teaching and testing device.
Davis and Rinvolucri write that "Decoding the sounds of English and recoding them in
writing is a major learning task" (1988) and Frodesen writes that dictation can be "an
effective way to address grammatical errors in writing that may be the result of erroneous
aural perception of English Dictation can help students to diagnose and correct these
kinds of errors as well as others." (1991)

According to Montalvan‟s opinion (2006), dictation has several following
advantages:
(1) Dictation can help develop all four language skills in an integrative way.
(2) Dictation helps to develop short-term memory. Students practice retaining
meaningful phrases or whole sentences before writing them down.
(3) Dictation can serve as an excellent review exercise.
(4) Dictation is psychologically powerful and challenging.
(5) Dictation fosters unconscious thinking in the new language.
(6) Dictation involves the whole class, no matter how large it is.
(7) During and after the dictation, all students are active.
(8) Correction can be done by the students.
(9) Dictation can be prepared for any level.
(10) Dictation can be administered quite effectively by an inexperienced teacher.
(11) While dictating, the teacher can (in fact should) move about, giving individual
attention.
(12) Dictation exercises can pull the class together during the valuable first minutes
of class.
(13) Dictation can provide access to interesting texts
(14) Correcting dictation can lead to oral communication.
(15) Practice in careful listening to dictation will be useful later on in note taking

There is a great deal of emphasis put on spelling mistakes in a dictation yet there is
very little work done to help the students to perceive the basic sound-spelling
correspondences revealed by their dictation errors.
Generally, students do not master the time factor. If they understand they cannot go
faster in order to take more time on something that they find more difficult (even though
this can be done).
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CHAPTER 2: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

2.1. An overview of the research site

Tan Yen High School N
0
2, the research site, situated in the west of Tan Yen
district, Bac Giang province, was established in 1975. Although the school was established
and developed in the very difficult conditions (bad infrastructure, lack of teachers, teaching
materials and equipment), it has for many years been the reliable address for students and
parents of the district.

The school has 39 classes with approximately 1695 students ranging from grade 10
to grade 12 and over 80 teachers of different subjects. English has been taught here as a
compulsory subject by eight teachers aged from 22 to 40. The teaching and learning of
English at school is based on the national curriculum set by the Ministry of Education and
Training. Therefore, all the students in the whole school use the same sets of nationwide
standardized textbooks of English (Tieng Anh 10, Tieng Anh 11, Tieng Anh 12). None of
the classes are taught with sets of advanced textbooks of English.


Of these eighty students, there are only 24 males and the rest are females. They all come
from villages in the district and most of them are at the age of 16, so they belong to the
same family background and psychological age group. Their time length of learning
English is also the same. That is, they all have been learning English since grade 6.

The three teachers (about 37.5% of the teachers of English) who were invited to
join the study are all full-time teachers of the school. One of them has been at work for
fifteen years, another for eight years, and the third for two years. One has taught grade 10
for two years, and the two others for four years. Two of them are female, and they all
graduated from English Department of Colleges of Foreign Languages. The researcher has
been teaching English for five years, and he is the only person who is doing an MA course
on methodology. Without doubt, all the teachers at Tan Yen High School N
0
2 are
experienced and enthusiastic about teaching. They are willing to help students their
students overcome the difficulties in leaning English.

2.4. The instruments

There is a variety of methods that can be employed to collect data such as
questionnaires, interviews, meeting, tests, observation and so on. Each method has its own
advantages and disadvantages. I chose questionnaires because it is one of the most popular
instruments. It is quite easy to prepare and it can be used with a large number of subjects.
25
What is more, the information collected is not very difficult to tabulate and to analyze
(Brown, 1995). Hence, survey questionnaire was chosen to collect teachers‟ opinions and
attitudes towards dictation as well as their comments and suggestions for using dictation in

students‟ listening skill has improved after the experiment has been terminated.
26
2.6. Data analysis

The data collected from the two sources were first read through to obtain a sense of
the overall data. They were then analyzed both descriptively and interpretatively. The
information from the survey questionnaires and listening tests was then displayed in the
forms of tables and charts while qualitative data from the open-ended questionnaire items
were used as reflective notes and quotations.

2.7. Summary

The third chapter has presented the research site whose notable contextual feature is
that learning English is compulsory but most grade-10 students have low listening
competence. Besides, the research questions, participants, instruments, and procedures of
data collection and analysis have also been discussed in this chapter. In a best attempt to
build a scientific methodology, the researcher hopes to achieve a reliable and valid data for
the study. The next chapter, chapter IV, is the presentation of the data analysis and
discussion.
3.1.1. Analysis and discussion of dictations with the T/F statement task
With the T/F practice task students have to listen to the dictation carefully, analyze
it and compare the given information (T/F statements) with the one presented in the
dictation. This task helps students not only hear the general information of the whole
dictation but also select the specific information to complete the sentences. This task is
designed to practise listening skill for general and specific information. It is used in the
practice task of dictation 1, dictation 2 and dictation 3. It aims at consolidating the
knowledge and enhancing students‟ listening skill in unit 1, unit 4 and unit 8 of English-10
textbook. Here are dictations and practice tasks for T/F statements.

Dictation 1 for unit 1
“I‟m Peter. Every day I get up at 6 o‟clock. I brush my teeth, wash my face and
have breakfast at 6.30. After breakfast, I get dressed and go to school at 6.45. My classes
start at 7 o‟clock and finish at 11 o‟clock. After school, I go home and have lunch at half
past eleven. In the afternoon I do my homework from 2 o‟clock to 5 o‟clock. After that I
28
help my mother cook dinner. In the evening, I watch TV from 7 o‟clock to 8 o‟clock. I
read books at 9 o‟clock and go to bed at 10 o‟clock.”

The topic of dictation 1 is similar to the one of unit 1. It is about “a day in the life
of …” or someone‟s daily life. In particular, this dictation describes the activities which
Peter does from the early morning to the late evening. Thus, students can widen their
knowledge of vocabulary related to daily activities. Besides, they revise the usage of the
present simple tense used to express day-by-day repeated activities with its adverbs of
frequency. Moreover, the questions of practice task focuses on bettering students‟ listening
skill for specific information. In other words, it helps to improve the listening skill for
deciding on True or False statements. This is the listening practice task for dictation 1.