Hey Sunday blue-skiers. I popped this up yesterday and it seems to have gained some traction. Have a read! - ThreadSky

kedisimpson.bsky.social • 14 days ago

Hey Sunday blue-skiers. I popped this up yesterday and it seems to have gained some traction. Have a read!

Reflecting on how best to do dictation exercises in class, with contributions from some very insightful year 10 languages students. learninglisteninglanguages.blogspot.com/2025/02/step...

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carmenzs.bsky.social•14 days ago

Thanks! I am new in my school, so I am discovering my students' preferences. I have noticed that even when they translate (not just when they listen) they go for gist. My interpretation is that we throw so much at them that they cope with it like regular speakers of a language: meaning first.

kedisimpson.bsky.social•14 days ago

That your learners go for 'meaning first' is interesting. Many of the errors made in my PhD participants were 'sound first' (translation, not transcription) - eg 'passport' for 'il n'y a pas de place pour'; 'Dubai' for 'salle de bains' and 'cat' for 'j'habite au quatrième étage'

carmenzs.bsky.social•14 days ago

I teach Spanish and French only at lower levels (and not every year). Phonics and dictations in Spanish are more "user friendly", I think.

carmenzs.bsky.social•14 days ago

I don't like the dictation, because it allows monsters like "jente" to get through (it does not look like the original word at all, I need to read it aloud to understand it) and disallows "abburrido", a sweet transfer of accent which also mirrors how we teachers speak when modelling vocabulary.

kedisimpson.bsky.social•14 days ago

I have a blog post drafted for next week, with working title 'dictation: what on earth are they thinking?' I'm sitting on it for now as it's very ranty!

theniceman.bsky.social•14 days ago

The fundamental error was thinking that dictation was a test of the sound spelling link.

Not for French!

French kids do dictation to STOP them writing it down how it sounds.

It's a test of the spelling and grammar knowledge of the written form, not present in the spoken form.

carmenzs.bsky.social•14 days ago

For people obsessed with distinguishing between experts and novices they make many novice mistakes. This dictation test is preposterous: narrow and specific to this qualification, useless for A Level and based on the three pillars nonsense. That arcane knowledge shared by nobody else in SLA.

carmenzs.bsky.social•14 days ago

Rant is good! Fiddling with the specification harms learning. When I started there was coursework: I used it to teach using verb tables and proofreading. Then there was controlled assessments. Same method plus Talk Project. Don't use Talk Project now because of behaviour. And now this aberration.

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