A Research On Dictation Strategies In TEM 4

With the rapid development of the global economy, English is being used as a world language by more and more people. Listening, speaking, reading and writing are the four important skills in language learning. In China, because of the Examination-orientated Education System, English teaching and learning focus on reading and writing while pay little attention to listening and speaking, so we often say that most students in middle school and high school are learning deaf and dumb English. In other words, students have difficulty in understanding others'English and communicating with people in English when they go to college or when they are in real communicative situations. To solve these problems, education policymakers have been advocating teaching reforms; college teachers are working hard to adapt to the reforms and the new situations; college students are working hard on listening and speaking.However, listening should be treated more seriously than the other three skills. As a receptive skill, listening is the basis for other skills, so people always put listening at the first place among the four skills when they mention them. That is one of the key reasons why listening takes up a large amount of score in many important tests such as College English Test (CET) and Test for English Majors (TEM). However, teachers have been used to lying emphasis on listening comprehension and ignoring the importance of English dictation. Thus, most students do poorly in the dictation part of the tests mentioned above, some students even get zero. In TEM 4 of 2009, the average score of dictation was 7.73, which was really far away from the full score 15. Researchers have found the problem and they have been studying on it. But most of their researches were based on students'dictation errors; few of them treated the problem on the side of diction strategies. That why this research was done in this area.In this paper, the research questions were as follows: first, to survey the current situations on TEM 4 dictation among English majors in the Inner Mongolia Normal University; second, to study the dictation strategies used by English majors in TEM 4; third, to find out the dictation strategies which were frequently used and which were seldom used; fourth, to discuss the differences between high-score students and low-score students in dictation strategies using and then provide advice for students to improve their dictation ability as well as their listening. The subjects in this research were two classes of English majors.One was majoring in English education; the other was majoring in business English. They were in Grade Two in the Inner Mongolia Normal University and they were going to have the TEM 4 in the coming April this year. The instruments in this research were test, questionnaire, and interview. And then the data was processed and analyzed with the help of SPSS 17.0.According to the research findings, most students had difficulty in doing dictation. 76% students got scores under 9. One student got 0 among 42 students. In order to know strategies used by the students, a comparison was made between high-score students (the top six students) and low-score students (the last six students). The two groups shared six strategies in common and among all the strategies which marked high frequency (means of the strategy was bigger the 4.000), there were four different ones: they were words writing strategy, language awareness strategy, guessing strategy and anxiousness controlling strategy. It seemed that except the common strategies, high-score students often used the former two strategies while the low-score students often used the latter two. Based on this, a bivariate correlation was made with the help of SPSS 17.0. It showed that there was a close positive correlation between language awareness strategy and the dictation score while there was a close negative correlation between guessing strategy and the dictation score. From the above, we knew that using different strategies was one of the important reasons why the two groups of students had different results in the test.Based on the result, the author made some teaching suggestions for the teachers on how to improve students'dictation scores and listening abilities. Finally, the author pointed out the limitation of this research and its development potential in the future.