Ezenwosu (2011:19) states, “Dictation practice is transcribing what a teacher says or read immediately after listening. The use of dictation as a valuable language teaching and learning technique has gone through a long history and has been used for centuries all over the world”. Hamzaday? and Çetinkaya (2013) state that although this technique is a part of classical teaching method and has been used in teaching for a long time, it is a technique that contains powerful cognitive features. When applying dictation technique, a problem is formed in the minds of the students first. This problem can be considered as cognitive preparation phase for students to get the new information. After posing the problem and increasing students’ level of readiness for new learning, the solution of the problem is given during dictation practice. Thus, it provides students an opportunity to form their cognitive structures or rearrange the potential mistakes. Blanche (2004:179) points out that like audio-lingual method, dictation practices are very old fashioned but they can be effectively used in the classroom to teach pronunciation as well as teaching listening and writing. Morris (1983:126) also accentuates that “Dictation is a test of integrative skills and a most useful tool in listening training and training in self-reliance”.

Dictation helps students improve their competencies in the target language they learn. Ezenwosu (2011:19) states, “Dictation ensures attentive listening, concentration and teaches students to write from dictation. It equally trains students to distinguish sounds and helps them learn punctuation and develop aural comprehension”. Parallel with Ezenwosu, Whitaker (1976) mentions that besides being a good teaching device for aural comprehension, dictation can also be valid for testing. Similarly, Valette (1964) asserts dictation practices help learners learn the foreign language as follows:

“In the case of the non-native speaker, the dictee introduces two additional factors: discrimination of sounds and general comprehension… Often the dictee is employed not only as a method of examining the student, but often as a means of learning. The students are encouraged to correct their own papers as the teacher repeats difficult sounds, emphasizes sentence structure, stimulates students’ awareness of grammatical agreements, and explains the meaning of trouble in some passages (p.431)”.

According to Davis and Rinvolucri (1989), dictation contains a wealth of new technique to extend the traditional language learning activity of dictation. The activities range from the traditional focus on spelling and punctuation problems to exercises that emphasize personal attitude and opinions of both teachers and students.

Dictation provides activities suitable for a wide range of levels and ages, example texts for many activities, opportunities for students to create their own texts, and a variety of suggested correction techniques.

Montalvan (1990) lists the advantages of dictation, and the most important ones are as follows:

1. Dictation can help develop all four language skills in an integrative way.

2. As students develop their aural comprehension of meaning and also of the relationship among segments of language, they are learning grammar.

3. Dictation helps to develop short-term memory. Students practice retaining meaningful phrases or whole sentences before writing them down.

4. Practice in careful listening to dictation will be useful later on in note taking exercises.

5. Correcting dictation can lead to oral communication.

6. Dictation can serve as an excellent review exercise.

Along with the benefits of dictation practices, knowing why and how to use dictation practices is also an important factor in using them effectively. Montalvan (1990) claims that most of the teachers do not completely understand the following points about dictation:

1. Where can dictation fit into a program?

2. Why is dictation a good exercise?

3. What objectives should be considered in using dictation in the classroom?

Furthermore, Davis and Rinvolucri (1989) propound some reasons why dictation practices should be used:

a. The students are active during the exercise.

b. Dictation leads to oral communicative activities.

c. Dictation fosters unconscious thinking.

d. Dictation copes with mixed-ability groups.

e. Dictation deals with large groups.

f. Dictation will often calm groups.

g. Dictation is safe for the non-native teacher.

h. Dictation gives access to interesting text.

Sawyer and Silver (1961) proposed four types of dictation practices to be used in language teaching:

a. The phonemic item dictation which consists of the teacher presenting the individual sounds of a language to students for transcription.

b. The phonemic text dictation which consists of the teacher reciting a passage which students phonetically transcribe.

c. The orthographic item dictation which is the dictating of individual words in isolation for transcription, similar to the traditional spelling test.

d. The dictation with the broadest learning possibilities is the orthographic text dictation, in which students transcribe a unified passage (as cited in Alkire, 2002).

Phonemic text dictation is an extended version of phonemic item dictation. It is a technique where teachers read the passage aloud and students phonetically transcribe it. Phonemic item dictation is an effective way to understand the changes in the phonemes. Symbols (letters) do not change in spoken language in Turkish. Phonemic text dictation can be used as an effective technique to make students realize the phonemes and transfer them in their writings; in other words, make them put their theoretical knowledge into practice (Çetinkaya and Hamzaday?, 2014).

Although there are many reasons why dictation should be used in teaching languages, there is only one study, carried out by Çetinkaya and Hamzaday? (2014), about the effect of dictation practices on writing skills in our case that is teaching Turkish as a foreign language. However, many researchers, some of whom were mentioned above, assert that dictation practice is a beneficial teaching-learning device for teaching sentence structure and grammar rules and also teaching listening and writing skills. In this respect, there is a need for the studies on the effect of phonemic text dictation practices on writing skills of Turkish as a Foreign Language (TFL) learners.

 

Aim

The aim of the present study was to determine the impact of dictation technique on B1 level TFL learners’ writing skills.  Two research questions were explored for the purpose of this study:

1. Are there any statistically significant differences in the number of perceived words between the pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental and control groups?

2. Are there any differences in terms of phonemic mistakes between the pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental and control groups?

 

Limitations of the study

The current study is limited to the foreign students learning Turkish at B1 level at Gaziantep University Turkish and Foreign Languages Research and Application Center during 2014 spring term. 

In this section, study design, participants, data collection process and data analysis are presented.

 

Study design

This study employed a quasi-experimental study with pretest-posttest control group design in order to determine the effectiveness of dictation technique over the number of perceived words by TFL learners and their ability in distinguishing Turkish phonemes. Experimental studies are carried out to measure the effectiveness of a technique. Participants are given a test both before and after the experiment, so as to test the effect of the independent variable on dependent variable (Büyüköztürk, 2007:19). So, in the present study, a quasi-experimental study design was used to investigate the impact of dictation technique on writing skills.

 

Participants

The participants of this study were 24 TFL learners at B1 level. They were randomly assigned into two groups, experimental and control. Table 1 shows the demographic profile of the participants, including their home countries, gender, age and years of learning.

 

 

As seen in the table, totally 24 students from 10 different countries including Egypt, Indonesia, Burundi, Uganda, Afghanistan, Equatorial Guinea, Iraq, Zambia, Ghana and Syria participated in this study. Because of the civil war in Syria, there were many Syrian students in TÖMER, so each group had more Syrian students.

Table 2 presents the gender distribution of the participants of the current study. 10 female and 14 male students participated in this study. 

 

 

The age distribution of the participants is presented in Table 3. As seen in the table most of the students were between 17-22 years (n=16), four were between 23-28 years and four between 29 years or older. 

 

 

Table 4 shows the distributions of the participants’ length of stay in Turkey. As to the participants’ length of stay in Turkey, 15 of the participants indicated they have been in Turkey for one to six months, 5 have been in Turkey for seven to twelve months, 2 have been in Turkey for one to three years and 2 have been in Turkey for over three years. 

 

 

First, the selected passages were read aloud slowly enough for the experimental group to understand and to make them familiar with the text to be dictated. During the first read-aloud session, the students just listened to the teacher. Then, it was read in chunks with pauses between each chunk and the students wrote down what they heard. Finally, it was read at normal speed again. This time the students reviewed their writing to restore any missing parts. The students’ writings were collected and corrected by the researcher and were given back to the students in the next session and they were asked to check their mistakes and examine corrected forms.

After a 10-week implementation period, the 106-word passage, entitled Health and Sports, was dictated again as posttest. The papers were collected without any correction.

Data collection and analysis

The data for the present study were collected through dictation of the passage, entitled “Health and Sports”. With an aim to find answers to the research questions, the numbers of the words perceived and written correctly were calculated for each student’s dictation both in the pretest and posttest. Content analysis and frequency analysis were implemented. Then, phonemic mistakes, specifically the most mistakenly dictated phonemes, were presented.

This section presents the results of the pretest and posttest analysis and their interpretations in the frame of the research questions.

 

The findings related to the first research question:

The first question of the study was “Are there any statistically significant differences in the number of perceived words between the pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental and control groups?”. To answer this question a pretest and a posttest were applied to both experimental and control groups. The change ratios of their perceived word counts are given in Table 5.

 

 

As can be clearly seen in Table 5, while experimental group students’ average number of perceived word was 78 in pretest, it increased to 104 in the posttest. In other words, a 25 percent increase in the number of the words they perceived in dictation tests. On the other hand, while control group students’ average number of perceived word was 91, interestingly it decreased to 85 in the posttest.  That is to say, there was a 5 percent decrease in the number of the words they perceived in the posttest. This shows that control group students who did not receive dictation treatment showed a decline in their perceived word counts within the process. This clearly reveals that teaching a foreign language without dictation practices can cause some loss even in students’ previous learning.

 

The findings related to the second research question:

The second question for the current study was “Are there any differences in terms of phonemic mistakes between the pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental and control groups?”.  To answer this question, the number of phonemic mistakes in pretest and posttest were com-pared. The results and changes are presented in Table 6.

 

 

When we consider Table 6 about the phonemic mis-takes we can see that there is a 32 percent improvement in favor of experimental group in terms of their vowel substitution mistakes; in contrary to experimental group, there is a 22 percent regression in the posttest. It was determined that the most vowel substitution mistake occurred between <?> and <i>. This mistake most probably stems from the lack of some Turkish phonemes as a letter in their native languages. After dictation practices, the number of <?><i> substitution mistake decreased from 94 to 70 in the experimental group while it decreased from 45 to 40 in the control group. In other words, when compared to control group the decrease in the number of <?><i> substitution mistake in experimental group was higher; it was observed that there was a 14 percent difference between the change ratios. 

When <a><e> substitution mistake was examined, there was a positive result in favor of control group in pretest, which was 11 mistakes for control group and 42 mistakes in experimental group; whereas the experi-mental group showed a 18.5 percent improvement on one hand, the control group showed a 63 percent decline on the other.

The findings related to <e><i> substitution mistake was similar to that of <a><e> substitution mistake in favor of control group. The experimental group showed a 17 percent improvement while the  control  group  showed  a

38 percent decline in their posttest scores.

When it comes to <o><ö><u><ü> substitution mistakes, a 31.5 percent improvement in favor of experimental group was observed in their posttests. A 39 percent improvement in other vowel substitution mistakes in favor of experimental group was observed.

As to the vowel omission, the study group showed a 43 percent improvement while the control group showed a 136 percent decline. When both groups’ vowel sound mistakes were examined in general, it was seen that the largest difference between the study group and control groups was in the amount of vowel omission (179%). Similarly, after dictation practices, study group showed a 44.5 percent improvement in the consonant spelling mistakes; whereas control group showed an 18 percent decrease in their mistakes.

This reveals that the control group, who did not have any dictation practices during the study showed a great decline in terms of the numbers of both vowel and consonant substitution mistakes. From another angle, we can say that this clearly reveals that teaching, specifically foreign language teaching, without dictation practices causes serious losses even in students’ pre-learning.

According to the pretest results, the most substituted consonants were <ç>and <c> in both groups. When the pretest results of the experimental group were examined, it was found that <m><n> phonemes were substituted 10 times, <p><b> were substituted 10 times, <s><z> and <l><r> were 6 times.  However, at the end of the study, it was observed that these substitution mistakes decreased in favor of the experimental group. Similar findings were also found for other consonant substitution mistakes. The experimental group had 25 substitution mistakes in the pretest, but in the posttest, it was observed that they showed a 32 percent improvement.

When the omission of the consonants was examined, the experimental group also showed a 46 percent improvement after the treatment. Similar findings were also reported by Çetinkaya and Hamzaday? (2014).

To conclude, it was determined that the experimental group showed a marked improvement not  only  in  vowel substitution mistakes but also in consonant substitution mistakes. This is an important and clearer indicator of how much dictation practices can help students in their correct use of vowels and consonants in the target language. 

In this section, the results of the study are given and some suggestions are proposed in the light of the findings.

 

Results

The present study investigated the impact of dictation practices on B1 level TFL learners’ writing skills. Within this frame, depending on the findings of the study, results are presented below:

1. The number of the study group’s perceived word was increased from 78 to 104 after the experiment. On the other hand, while the number of the control group’s perceived word was 91 in the pretest, it decreased to 85 in the posttest.

2. Both groups made more vowel mistakes than consonant mistakes. While the number of the experimental group’s vowel spelling mistakes was 345 in the pretest, it decreased to 235 after dictation practices. As to the control group, they made 189 vowel spelling mistakes in the pretest and they made 231 mistakes in the posttest.

3. While the number of the experimental group’s consonant spelling mistakes was 153 in the pretest, it decreased to 85 after the treatment. As for the control group, they made 103 consonant spelling mistakes in the pretest and they made 122 mistakes in the posttest.

Although the current study could be regarded as the first attempt to measure the effects of dictation activities over TFL learners’ writings at phonemic level, there are certain points that need to be considered. The researcher acknowledges two shortcomings concerning the current study. First of all, as was mentioned earlier, most of the participants were of Arabic origin; therefore some results may have stemmed from L1 interference since the Arabic language does not have the /p/ phoneme in its inventory. The same can be claimed for the participants from south eastern countries. Actually, their language lacks the equivalent of the phoneme <ç> in Turkish. 

Second point worth mentioning is the quantitative difference between the two groups at the pre-test stage. It is clear that the control group performed better than the experimental group at the initial stage, and at the post-test stage this situation seemed to have changed in favor of the experimental group. This shift is quite interesting for a quasi-experimental study. The reasons of this shift could be both qualitatively and quantitatively; however, these points need to be analyzed as primary concerns of further studies.

 

Suggestions

1. In teaching Turkish as a foreign language context, dictation practices should be frequently used specifically teaching at basic levels when teaching phonemes and their written symbols, vowel and consonant sound rules (haplology, consonant assimilation, consonant harmony, etc.); when teaching at upper levels, it should also be used at intervals.

2. To improve TFL learners writing skills and help them be able to understand the words and discriminate the sounds in a word, dictation practice could be regarded as an alternative technique to be included not only in class activities but also in course books. 

 

The author has not declared any conflict of interests.