Using Picture Dictation Exercises for Practising All

Four Skills
Sylvia Sao Leng Ieong
slieong [at] umac.mo
University of Macau (Macao SAR, PR China)
This exercise focuses on choosing or preparing a text in clear visual terms so that it
can be used for picture dictation, which involves learners in all four skills of listening
with attention, fun and interest, speaking with confidence, reading with care and
purpose and writing with accuracy.

Rationale
Dictation has never been popular with learners of English as a foreign language.
However, the picture dictation designed here, which sufficiently prepares learners for
the activity, involves students in all four skills of listening, speaking, reading and
writing. It has been extremely popular with pre-intermediate level learners and has
proved very successful. Success is always a good motivator for learners.

Steps
Normally the exercise takes about 20-30 minutes, depending on the length of the
dictation, in the following six steps:
1.
Prior to the dictation exercise, the teacher chooses or prepares a text that is
appropriate to the level of the learners and is written in simple visual terms,
like the one quoted from John Haycraft:
There's an island in the middle of a lake. In the middle of the island there's a
house with a big door and four windows on the ground floor, and six windows
on the first floor. There're a lot of big trees to the left of the house. On the lake,
to the right of the island, there's a boat with two men in it. One of them is
fishing.
To the left of the lake there's a hill with a church on the top. It's midday and
the sun is in the sky.
2.

Listening with an immediate purpose, interest and fun:

The teacher asks two students (gradually more and more students will be
eager to volunteer) to come up to the black/white board, each using half of the
board, and draw what they hear while the teacher reads aloud the text to the
class, explaining contractions, prepositions, new or difficult words, plural
nouns, etc., and even writes them on the board if necessary. As these will be
dictated later on, students will listen with attention and interest and try their
best to remember them. The teacher can speak faster or more slowly
depending on the students' response and performance to ensure that learners
can work and progress smoothly.

3.

Speaking with confidence and pride:

After the teacher finishes reading aloud and the two students have completed
their pictures, the teacher asks the class if the pictures are correct. After
corrections are made, the teacher asks the two student artists to explain and
talk about their pictures. They are ready and proud to talk about their work in
front of the class.
4.
Listening again with understanding and writing with accuracy:
Now the teacher dictates the text in the traditional way while the students
write on sheets of paper or in their notebooks.
5.
Reading with special care in order to locate mistakes:
Now the teacher displays the correct text using an overhead projector,
PowerPoint or the blackboard and asks the students to exchange their sheets
or books to check and correct each other's work.
6.
The teacher may only need to do a sample check of students' work if the
teacher can trust their students to correctly make corrections.

Conclusion
Both pre-service student teachers and in-service teachers have tried this method
with beginners, pre-intermediate- and intermediate-level learners. Their response is
very encouraging. Learners like picture dictation because it is positive and
interesting. When they do the actual dictation they are already well prepared and find
the work pleasant and rewarding. Some teachers report that there are no more
failures in this kind of dictation. However, these teachers could not find enough
appropriate texts or passages available for picture dictation and they have difficulty
in creating such texts suitable for picture dictation.

The many benefits of dictation exercises

Most probably regarded as a somewhat old-fashioned, pedestrian technique with few advantages to the
student, dictation actually has many benefits to both students and their teachers.
If done systematically and regularly, dictation exercises improve students ability to distinguish sounds in
continuous speech as well as improving their spelling and their recognition of grammatically correct
sentences and their production of them. Davis and Rinvolucri write that "Decoding the sounds of [English]
and recoding them in writing is a major learning task" (1988)
Unlike a reliance on grammar exercises on the page of a book, language processed by students doing
such exercises proceeds through more processing steps and becomes more integrated into memory than
is the case with sentences written down with no context to anchor them to facilitate recall later.
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) Our students inability to produce
grammatically correct sentences is familiar to every teacher, and since our students hear or see little
English outside the classroom, either between themselves in dormitories and hostels, and very likely at
home, giving students dictation exercises could be looked upon as one way of redressing this.

The links provided below appear on the Dictation page of the Writing Centre website (URL here), so once
students begin to become familiar with the use of dictation in the classroom, it is hoped that they will
access some of these sites outside class time. The links provide interactive exercises (students listen
write get immediate feedback on the substance of each dictation), and so can measure their own
progress as they work their way through the exercises on these sites.
The benefits of dictation
Dictation makes the students and the teacher aware of the students' comprehension errors-phonological, grammatical, or both. In English, typical errors include the frequent omissions of bound
morphemes such as:
The -s plural
The -'s possessive
The -s third person singular
The -ed ending for regular past participles.
The ability to distinguish and produce the items listed above come well down the list of things our
students are required to have mastered, even at Level 1, yet we find repeated errors of this kind right
up to and including Level 3 and ESP.
Dictation shows students the kinds of spelling errors they are prone to make.
Students seeing their own written responses next to the correct ones in exercises should provide
invaluable guidance in the ways that their spelling can be improved. Of course, there is no guarantee
that students will conscientiously work their way through such exercises once they are outside our
jurisdiction, so to speak, it is hoped that they will react positively once the benefits are shown in the
classroom. In any case, only those students who are really motivated to improve will do them anyway.
Dictation gives students practice in comprehending and transcribing clear English prose. This is important
because we have all encountered awkward sentences in textbooks that are not good models of English
writing, or raise grammatical, syntactic, or semantic questions that are not the point of the exercise to
begin with. One example from a rather famous source: "When you receive a request like that, you cannot
fail to obey it." This was in a textbook for a pre-intermediate class and came without a footnote to aid
the student.
This point may only be marginally applicable to us, using in-house materials, as most of us do, but some
of the English in our textbooks may sound awkward to native users without necessarily doing so to nonnative users. It is important for students to hear as well as read a standard version of English, supposing
there to be such a thing.
Dictation gives students valuable practice in note-taking. Students may already be in courses in which
they must take notes of lectures delivered in English at normal speaking speed. While no one should take
lecture notes that are exact transcriptions, learning to write spoken language quickly is an essential
college skill.
Notetaking is a core competency and a valuable addition to a students inventory of sub-skills, and while
we may teach techniques and strategies to recognize the signposting of information, students still have
to comprehend what is said in situations in which both the language used and the information conveyed
by it are unfamiliar. Regular dictation exercises will help students recognition of super and suprasegmentals in the lectures that attend.

Dictation gives practice in correct forms of speech. Note: We have all read student compositions with
grammatically correct sentences that are not correct forms, for example She is a surgeon of hearts or He
is a good cooker.
Any attempt to improve our students grasp of vocabulary has to help; the comprehension of
pronunciation of words in a foreign language, particularly in the English language, is problematic and
difficult; the apparent lack of any regular correspondence between spelling and pronunciation of English
words in isolation is compounded in connected speech. Students need to hear and understand authentic
speech patterns in a systematized way that ensures full comprehension later in faculty.
Dictation can help develop all four language skills in an integrative way.
How many of the methods we employ can make that claim? Many of our lessons give scant importance to
at least one of the four skills. A writing lesson may well employ texts to be read, but how many dwell on
the spoken variety or its comprehension; at best, all a student gets in these is the teachers instructions
before starting a particular task.
Dictation helps to develop short-term memory. Students practice retaining meaningful phrases or whole
sentences before writing them down. Having given dictation exercises, I have been made to realize how
little students can retain whilst listening is in progress. It is almost as though more water is being added
to an already full cup; some has to be poured out in order to make room for more to be added. However,
I have also found that as students are introduced to more and more dictation exercises, their ability to
both forecast what is coming and to retain what has already been said increases rapidly and noticeably.
Both abilities point to evidence of an increased familiarity with the language.
Dictation can serve as an excellent review exercise.
Once a passage has been dictated, much valuable work can be done in getting students to notice their
own errors on the page they have just written; what happens is that many students come to recognize
their errors by virtue of the positioning of items in sentences parts of speech, for example, as well as
equally obvious things like verb tenses.
Dictation is psychologically powerful and challenging.
The concentration required to keep up with the dictation exercises in class, together with the pressure
to keep up with everyone else listening to the passage ensures that exercises are totally enveloping,
meaning that once begun, they take over the class, and thus at once become a challenge that all face
together. It is my experience that students listening and writing to something being dictated become
absolutely absorbed in the activity, a point which leads on to the next in this series.
Dictation fosters unconscious thinking in the new language.
Since dictation, even at its sometimes funereally slowest, forces students to engross themselves in the
target language, not having time to go through native language equivalence to assist themselves. If the
students do well, dictation is motivating. At first, if not paced appropriately, or if too much of the
vocabulary is unknown to students, taking part in dictation exercises can be very stressful and too
demanding. It is important, therefore, to grade passages for complexity and for the ratio of new,
unknown words to known ones. Once students begin to get used to voice levels and speed, success
follows, which, even partially is a great motivator.
Dictation involves the whole class, no matter how large it is.
It goes without saying that dictation exercises must involve everyone in the room, although with more
advanced classes, a sort of mixing of passages would be very advantageous, particularly since much

natural language heard in vitro, is not heard in isolation.

During and after the dictation, all students are active.
Activity is intense at every stage of dictation exercises; heads are down whilst students are listening, of
course, but afterwards, in reviewing what has been written, and in striving to turn it into an acceptable
form to teacher, written up on whiteboards for all to see and scrutinize.
Correction can be done by the students
This is vital; it is in finding mistakes and attending to them that students learn. Peers can help here and
usually do, with a sort of instinctive class consensus operating to bring slower students up to scratch.
Dictation can be prepared for any level.
Dictation can be as complicated or as simple as is appropriate for the level of students. At elementary
levels, single words can be produced, going on gradually to more connected speech.
The students, as well as the teacher, can get instant feedback if desired.
The feedback is built into the exercises (this applies to online exercises too), and indeed, students
become used to actually wanting to know the correct form.
Dictation can be administered quite effectively by an inexperienced teacher.
The nature of dictation exercises, although fairly simplistic in their operation, do make demands upon
the teacher; oration must be loud and clear, but as importantly, must not proceed at an unnaturally slow
speed since connected speech is disturbed and radically altered by too slow a delivery. Shortened forms,
for example, are often removed if delivery isnt paced at a natural pace. Giving dictation is
straightforward, in terms of procedure, but reading out loud is not as easy as it might sound.
While dictating, the teacher can (in fact should) move about, giving individual attention.
This is a matter of opinion, although moving round the classroom could mean that students sitting in the
far corners get more exposure to the dictation than would be the case were the speaker to stand on one
spot.
Dictation exercises can pull the class together during the valuable first minutes of class.
Once a dictation exercise has started, in my experience, latecomers quickly fall into step without the
need to stop and disrupt the concentration of others.
Dictation can provide access to interesting texts.
The variety of texts that can be used is virtually infinite; students of literature might benefit to hearing
Shakespeare or Joyce, whilst students of the sciences would most definitely benefit from their hearing
words that are rarely spoken in everyday speech words that are common in certain disciplines might be
rarities in common parlance.
Knowing how to take dictation is a skill with "real world" applications. Many jobs demand accurate
understanding of spoken orders (phone agents, dispatchers, administrative assistants, etc.). Also, the
U.S. citizenship exam requires examinees to take a dictation. The advantage of being able to quickly,
easily and correctly comprehend what is being said in any given situation is obvious; all too often, people
who profess to know the language fall down when it is spoken for longer than the simplest of utterances.
Dictation can be a good indicator of overall language ability; it can be used in testing.
Dictation exercises lend themselves to standardization and repeatability; two qualities essential to the
production of examinations that accurately test what they set out to do, and give reliable and verifiable
results to examiners and examined alike.

http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Alkire-Dictation.html
Online dictation links
1. Learn English Network -http://www.learnenglish.de/dictationpage.htm
2. Handouts -http://www.smic.be/smic5022/handoutsgrammarand.htm
3. Using picture dictation - http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Ieong-Dictation.html
4. Interactive dictation exercises - http://ressources-cla.univ-fcomte.fr/english/listen_index.htm
5. Real English Interactive Dictation Exercises (beginners) -http://ressources-cla.univfcomte.fr/english/dictations/realenglish/realindex.htm
6. Homophone spelling exercises -http://spelling.wordpress.com/2007/08/09/dictation-exerciseshomophone-spelling-practice/
7. Dictation Practice -http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/hist455/dictation/index.htm