Learning Psychology
Authors: Roya Khoii, Pourhassan Elham
Title: Effects of Different Types of Dictation Practice on Immediate and Delayed Performance on Tests of Present Tense “To Be” Verbs and Indefinite Articles
Journal: Iranian Journal of Teaching English as a Foreign Language and Literature, Vol. 2, No. 3. 2010

Introduction

The role of grammar in language instruction has been an issue of great controversy. In the early parts of the twentieth century grammar teaching was so fundamental in language instruction that the other aspects of language learning were either overlooked or de-mphasized. In the past, grammar teaching was considered as the presentation and practice of discrete grammatical structures. The present study investigated the effects of three types of dictation practice (standard dictation, dicto-comp, and dictogloss) on elementary EFL learners' immediate and delayed performance on tests of present tense to be verbs and indefinite articles in English.

A. Statement of the Problem:

* Will the effects of the standard type of dictation between its immediate and delayed effects on acquisition of grammatical knowledge be different to that of the effects of dicto-comp dictation and dicto-gloss dictation when it is measured by performance on multiple-choice tests?

B. Hypothesis:

* Empirical Hypothesis:

* If students score higher when subjected to the standard type of dictation than that of those under dicto-comp dictation, than those under dictogloss type of dictation then the Standard Dictation has a different immediate and delayed effect to the other types of dictation.

* Null Hypothesis:

* There is no significant difference between the immediate and delayed effects of Standard Dictation, Dicto-comp dictation and Dictogloss dictation.

C. Objectives of the study: The study would want to show how the different types of dictation affects the acquisition of grammar in elementary Persian students. The study would serve as a basis as to what type of dictation must be administered to the students in teaching to help them with their learning and understanding of a specific subject not just English.

Methodology:

A. Research Design

A “quasi-experimental pretest-posttest nonequivalent-groups design” was employed to conduct this study. The independent variable of the study was dictation, which appeared in three forms: standard dictation, dicto-comp, and dictogloss, and the dependent variable was grammar.

Three intact classes were randomly assigned to three experimental groups (standard dictation, dicto-comp, and dictogloss groups), each receiving one form of dictation practice as treatment. There was no control group in this study.

B. Reseacrh Environment

The research is done in a classroom environment in the English language institute in Iran.

C. Subjects/Participants

The participants of this study consisted of 59 elementary level young-adult Iranian female students studying English as a foreign language in an English language institute in Iran in three intact classes, each consisting of 20, 20, and 19 students.

D. Procedure

The procedure consisted of the administration of an achievement test and two pretests, three different types of treatment (i.e., standard dictation, dicto-comp, and dictogloss), and the administration of two immediate and two delayed posttests:

Phase 1: Pretests

After the selection of the ultimate participants of the study based on their scores on the achievement test, each group received a 20-item multiple-choice pretest of present tense to be verbs and another 20-item multiple-choice pretest of indefinite articles.

The present tense to be verbs items had three choices each (i.e., “am”, “is”, or “are”). The indefinite articles items had two choices each (i.e., “a” or “an”), and the students were to choose the correct answer and mark it on their answer sheets. The time allocated to these two tests was 30 minutes. One point was given to each correct answer, and there was no penalty for wrong choices.

Phase 2: Treatment

The target structures were taught in a step-by-step fashion by writing different examples containing the target grammatical patterns on the board. When the students became familiar with the patterns, they practiced them by performing some oral grammar drills including substitution, transformation, and expansion drills. At first they practiced the patterns in groups, then in pairs, and then individually.

Finally, the teacher wrote some extra sentences on the board and asked the students to copy them in their notebooks and practice them at home. All the classes were taught by the same teacher using the same material.

From the following session, each group received a different form of dictation practice. In the standard dictation group, the teacher read the passage at the normal speed three times, with each reading serving its own purpose. In order to administer the dictogloss to the second group the procedure consists of preparation, dictation, reconstruction, and analysis with correction. The procedure of dicto-comp in this study followed the instructions given by Celce- Murcia and Hilles (1988). At first, the teacher reviewed the structures in the text and made sure that all the students were aware of the form and meaning of the target structures. She also emphasized that the students had to use them in their reconstructions of the text. Secondly, the teacher read the dicto-comp to the students three times at the normal speed. The students listened but did not write until after the last dictation. After each of the first two readings, the students were allowed to ask questions about the words or phrases that confused them.

Phase 3: Immediate Posttests

One session after the end of the treatments, two immediate posttests of the target grammatical structures were given to all the three groups. Like the items on the pretests, the present tense to be verbs items had three choices, and the indefinite articles items had two choices each. The students had 30 minutes to answer the questions.

Phase 4: Delayed Posttests

Three weeks after the immediate posttests, the students' progress in the two target grammatical structures in all the three groups was tested again using two delayed posttests similar to the pretests. The time allocated to the tests was 30 minutes.

E. Instruments Used

The instruments used in this study consisted of an achievement test, two pretests, two immediate posttests, and two delayed post-tests.

* Achievement test

The achievement test was a forty-item teacher-made test in the multiple-choice format based on the students' textbook Magic Time (Kampa & Vilina, 2001), which the students had studied the previous semester. The test included 10 listening comprehension items, 20 vocabulary items, and 10 matching items.

F. Statistical Analysis

* Achievement Test

As mentioned before, the researchers constructed a forty-item test based on the students' previous course book. After scoring the papers and calculating the B-indices of the items, 10 of them were eliminated due to their low B-indices.

With F (2, 52) = 1.056, p =.355 (two-tailed), it was concluded that the three groups were homogeneous in terms of their variance and running a one-way ANOVA in order to compare the means of the three groups on the achievement test was legitimate.

The result of the ANOVA given in Table 3 [F (2, 52) = 1.108, p = .388 (two-tailed)] indicates that the three groups belonged to the same population in terms of language knowledge before the beginning of the treatment. * Analysis 2: Pretests

After the administration and scoring of the achievement test, two pretests, one including 20 multiple choice items on present tense to be verbs and the other including 20 indefinite articles, were administered to the three groups in one session.

The pretest mean scores of the three groups were very low. Considering 20 as the highest score on each pretest, it was concluded that the three groups had no or very little knowledge of the target grammatical structures. However, two one-way ANOVAs along with the related Levene’s statistic were run in order to compare the means of the three experimental groups on the pretests.

Based on the result of the Levene’s test in Table 5, F (2, 52) = 1.776, p = .179 (two-tailed), it was decided that the three groups enjoyed equal variances. Moreover, a one-way ANOVA comparing the means of the three groups on the present tense to be verbs pretest revealed that, with F (2, 52) = .544, p = .584 (two-tailed), there was no significant difference between the means of the three groups on this test.

* Analysis 3: Immediate Posttests

After establishing the homogeneity of the participants regarding the variables of the study, the treatment phase started and continued for three sessions. Then, one session after the end of the treatments, the immediate posttests of the two target grammatical structures were administered to the three groups.

The mean of the standard dictation group was the highest (16.20) on the to be verbs immediate posttest with the dicto-comp group scoring the lowest. On the indefinite articles immediate posttest, the mean of the standard dictation group was also the highest (14.90), with the dictogloss and dicto-comp groups scoring 10.39 and 10.24, respectively. Later a one-way ANOVA was conducted to check the statistical significance of the differences between the means of all the groups on the test.

F (2, 52) = 11.540, p = .000 (two-tailed) indicates that there was a significant difference between the means of the three groups on the immediate posttest of present tense to be verbs.

* Analysis 4: Delayed Posttests

To investigate the delayed effects of the treatments, three weeks after the administration of the immediate posttests, two delayed posttests of present tense to be verbs and indefinite articles each with 20 items were given to the three groups.

The means of the dictogloss, dicto-comp, and standard dictation groups were 16.00, 14.94, and 11.15 on the delayed posttest of present tense to be verbs, and 10.72, 11.00, and 10.45, respectively, on the delayed posttest of indefinite articles. The results of a one-way ANOVA with F (2, 52) = 9.050, p = .000 (two-tailed) indicated that there was a significant difference between the three groups' mean scores on the delayed posttest of the present tense to be verbs.

G. Discussions:

The quantitative analysis of the collected data indicated that the standard dictation group had significantly outperformed the other groups on immediate tests of English present tense to be verbs and indefinite articles, but it could not carry over this effect to the delayed posttest.

There might be several reasons for the findings of this study. In the standard dictation group, the students wrote the sentences or phrases chunk by chunk as they heard them; therefore, they kept the chunks only for a short time in their memory. Thus this type of dictation involved immediate recall and had an immediate effect on the students' performance on the given test.

Based on the results, the performance of the standard dictation group deteriorated on both the delayed tests of the target structures.

In dicto-comp and dictogloss activities, the students had to listen to the passage as a whole and were not allowed to write it during the listening phase. Then they tried to reconstruct the text from their memory without any further help. The students were supposed to reconstruct the text with a delay. The probable internalization of the target grammatical structure, which resulted from doing the dicto-comp and dictogloss activities, surfaced on the students' performance on the delayed posttest of present tense to be verbs.

The results also indicated that that the dicto-comp and dictogloss treatments did not produce the same positive effect on the students' performance on indefinite articles delayed posttest. The researchers believe that the structures explored here might have been difficult for young-adult students to acquire, and they might not have had a clear realization of them, particularly because their native language (Persian) lacks a distinctly similar structure to English indefinite articles.

H. Conclusions/Implications:

This study revealed the differing immediate and delayed effects of three types of dictation practice on elementary students' performance on tests of the targeted grammatical structures. Based on the results of the statistical analysis of the collected data, it was concluded that the standard dictation activity is superior to dictogloss and dicto-comp activities in promoting students’ performance on immediate tests of present tense to be verbs and indefinite articles, while dictogloss and dicto-comp activities are superior to the standard dictation activity in promoting the students’ performance on delayed tests of present tense to be verbs. However, none of the three types of dictation activities seem to produce a statistically significant difference in delayed performance on tests of indefinite articles.

I. Recommendation

Since grammar is a crucial component of language, materials developers could include some dicto-comp and dictogloss activities as useful techniques for teaching and practicing grammatical structures. Practicing with different types of dictation not only produces some long-lasting effects regarding the acquisition of some grammatical structures, it can also add variety in the language class.