Does Dictation Improve English Listening?

Dictation is an effective means of testing, but it is not an effective way to practice listening. The two are not to be confused. For listening teachers, there is no more worry-free "teaching method" than dictation; For students, taking dictation as a means of listening training is time-consuming and cumbersome, and the unit time benefit is very low, which is not conducive to cultivating the habit of concentrating on grasping and memorizing the content (not just words) when listening, nor is it conducive to improving the interest in learning English, so it is recommended not to do more.

When I used to teach English majors at China Foreign Affairs University, I never asked them to do dictation: I cared about how quickly they could improve their listening, especially the use of English, rather than whether they understood and spelled every word in a piece of material correctly. The purpose of listening practice, most people will say, is to "understand" English; But what are you doing when you dictate, listen intensively and try to understand:

Spelling words, whether it's listening, reading, grammar, new words, speaking, writing, pronunciation, or intonation, is all about learning to use English. If you agree that "we eat to be full and eat well", then would you agree that "two chopsticks must be used separately, one for grilling rice and one for 'clipping' vegetables;".Don't use a spoon when you use a bowl, don't use a bowl when you use a spoon", if you don't agree, then why do you have to "a chopstick, a spoon, only practice listening + spelling words, others can not touch", and what I want my students to do is to use a pair of chopsticks + spoon + bowl to eat quickly and well, that is, to maximize the efficiency of learning English while practicing listening, killing multiple birds with one stone. Let's start with that.

The key to listening is: listening, which is the first problem that needs to be solved in listening practice; Comprehension, sometimes due to a lack of sense of language or background knowledge, even if you understand every word of a sentence, you can't understand the meaning of the whole sentence. <>

When a new listening material is written, be sure to listen to it twice in a row, without interruption or word by word. At this time, I don't want to understand most of the content, but only to understand a general idea. Even if you only understand a few words, it doesn't matter, which is completely normal for novice listening, and you don't have to blame yourself at all (even if you feel that your reading comprehension level has reached the level of "New Concepts" Volume 4, but you have never practiced listening); Listen word by word.

At first, it may be difficult to listen to a relatively long sentence at once: when you hear the end of the sentence, you have long forgotten what was said at the beginning of the sentence. And that's not surprising either:

Even the best interpreters need to rely on notes to help their memory, and you are still in the stage of groping for "finding the way" when you practice listening, when you listen to it word by word, you can break down a sentence into several parts to listen to, and as soon as you finish listening to a small part, you can immediately repeat it orally and repeat it again. In doing so, the effect will be better than dictation: not only do you have to know what you're hearing, but you're mimicking the tone of your voice, all at once.

Material selection about the selection of materials, dictation is best to choose a moderate speed and difficulty, short article, do not choose news or highly professional materials, personal recommendation to choose the fourth English dictation part of the material for practice, if you feel difficult you can choose the sixth level of dictation part of the practice, but do not fill in the blanks according to the question type of the sixth level when practicing, but write down what you hear word by word. Dictation is the next method of dictation, don't rush to write at the beginning, the first time to listen to the material as a whole to understand the general meaning, from the second time to slow down and listen sentence by sentence, you can listen to it several times at the beginning, but you must not start writing as soon as you hear the words, so the result is often that the sentence has been listened to, and you have only written two or three words. Be sure to start writing after listening to this sentence, write down key words and real words, and complete the sentence when you finish listening to it next time (note that you are also writing after listening, don't write while listening).

After listening to each sentence, listen to it as a whole to check it. <>