What is dictation? What are the advantages and disadvantages of dictation?
Dictation is one of the oldest language teaching activities. It is perhaps for the reason that it has been recently neglected by the teachers, claiming that it is “too teacher centered, uncommunicative, boring and old fashioned”. Dictation is a decoding-recording activity. It is the act or process of dictating material to another for transcription. Oller (1979) defines it as a “psychologically real system that sequentially orders linguistic elements in time and it relates to extra linguistic context in meaningful ways”. “The passage intended for dictation has to be broken down into stretches that will be spoken without a break. These should be fairly long, beyond rote memory so that the candidates can decode, store and then re-decode what they hear”. Then the stretches are read out, not too slowly, one after the other with enough time for the candidates to write down they have heard. Three elements are involved in dictation: (a) Filter, (b) Organizer and (c) Monitor. ...