Transforming Reading Vocabulary Into Listening Vocabulary Through Dictation Training: An Experimental Study

As a crucial basic skill and one of the most important factors in communication, listening is given great attention in the current English as a foreign language curriculum and pedagogy in China. Listening vocabulary refers to the vocabulary which phonetics and meaning can be recognized by listeners in the process of listening. The lack of listening vocabulary is the main obstacle for non-English majors'listening performance in CET-4. The transformation of reading vocabulary into listening vocabulary will contribute a lot to improve students'listening comprehension.The author randomly sampled 63 participants coming from non-English major in a university located in Liaoning province. An advanced class was chosen as the reference. With reading vocabulary and listening vocabulary size tests as the assessment objectives and the scores of CET-4 as the data support, the author carried out the experiment. There are three vocabulary size tests, one is reading vocabulary size test (RVST), and the other two are listening vocabulary size tests, which are called Listening Vocabulary Size Test 1 (LVST1) and Listening Vocabulary Size Test 2 (LVST2) respectively. The students had two pre-tests including RVST and LVST1. After the experiment, they took LVST2.After one-month's vocabulary dictation training and the analysis of the experiment figures, this study got the following results:1) The gap between reading vocabulary and listening vocabulary for the higher level students is smaller than that of the lower level students.2) Through vocabulary dictation training, students'reading vocabulary could be transformed into listening vocabulary in both normal class and advanced class.3) Intensive vocabulary dictation training impacts the lower level students much more than the higher level ones, which is contradicted with people's common belief.It has been proved in this thesis that vocabulary dictation is an effective way to convert reading vocabulary into listening vocabulary. No matter in listening class or in intensive English class, dictation training should be involved in class activities. Teachers should attach importance to vocabulary teaching since increasing the reading vocabulary size has positive effect on enlarging listening vocabulary size.Listening comprehension has always been a project that draws many researchers'and teachers'attention to investigate. Many frontline teachers are continually exploring effective measures to improve students'listening comprehension, and the author has also made consistent efforts to study the field and hopes this research, as a complementary means to listening vocabulary acquisition, will arouse more scholars'interests.