A Study On The Effect Of Dictogloss On Listening Comprehension Of Chinese English Majors

Dictation is indispensable in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) listening teaching. However, inadequate attention has been paid to its potential on developing communicative competence of Chinese English majors. Dictogloss focuses on the development of communicative competence and represents a major shift from the traditional way of listening teaching solely emphasizing linguistic competence. Few researchers have examined the effect of dictogloss on Chinese EFL listening teaching, the present study, thus, is to investigate the effect of dictogloss on listening comprehension of Chinese English majors.The study is based on three theories, the communicative view of language, cooperative language learning, as well as Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD).The methodology of the present study consists of a quantitative experiment and interviews. The experiment involved 46 freshmen English majors from Tianjin Foreign Studies University. 22 served as the control group, receiving traditional dictation; 24 served as the experimental group, receiving dictogloss. They all took a pretest and posttest chosen from the section of listening comprehension in CET-6 (College English Test-Band 6). By SPSS, the scores were compared by means of independent samples t-tests and paired samples t-tests. After the posttest, interviews were conducted with the purpose of a further investigation on the effect of dictogloss from the students' perspective.The independent samples t-test for the posttest fails to yield a significant difference between the control group and the experimental group. Only the paired samples t-test for the experimental group shows a significant difference between means of the pretest and posttest. The students' feedback in the interviews supports and helps the author better interpret the statistical results.This paper draws a conclusion that a significant difference may be achieved between the experimental group and the control group in a delayed independent samples t-test. In other words, in the long term dictogloss may improve the students' listening comprehension more effectively than traditional dictation. The paper also points out limitations and addresses recommendations for future research.