The Benefits of Dictation Practice for Learning a Foreign Language
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1. Fully Supports and Enhances All 4 Skills: Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing
- Listening. Because you listen and write at the same time, you'll know the vocabulary precisely, or you'll need to use your powers of inference to listen as accurately as possible.
- Writing. This skill (or typing) benefits from having fewer spelling mistakes, learning many more good, highly applicable sentence patterns and phrases, and avoiding the habit of translating from your mother tongue into the target language.
- Reading comprehension. This skill will also improve, because when doing dictation you have to understand and guess the meaning of words at the same time, so your reading skill is bound to improve as well.
- Speaking. Listening correctly leads to speaking correctly — if you practice speaking along with the listening passage, and also look up how vocabulary is pronounced or use other listening-practice apps, record yourself reading it back to compare... then you will definitely improve your pronunciation and your foreign-language speaking ability.
2. Builds Perseverance, Carefulness, and Logical Thinking
- Perseverance. Doing dictation in a foreign language is a task that demands real perseverance, especially in the early stage.
- Carefulness. To get the most out of dictation, carefully checking and reviewing every little mistake against the answer key is essential. This helps round out active skills such as writing and speaking.
- Developing logical thinking. When you keep listening and just can't catch a word, you need to use your head to guess based on the context and the surrounding vocabulary. That is a way of forcing the brain to reason in order to work out what the word is. Sometimes our ears simply can't stay as alert as our brain when it comes to hearing homophones with different meanings.
3. Gain a Lot of New Knowledge Beyond the Language Itself.
The weekly listening lessons from WELE Vietnam all cover a range of topics from easy to difficult, so picking up plenty of extra knowledge about history, economics, culture, society, and science is very much a given if you diligently do dictation practice.
For example, this week's listening lesson ESL 10224 Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis) explains the phenomenon of the Earth's aurora and the legends different peoples have about it. After listening, it really does broaden your horizons, doesn't it?