An Experimental Study On The Effectiveness Of Classroom Dictation Practice In Improving Non-english Majors’ Listening Competence

Being one of four essential language skills in English studying, listening ability is a process to passively accept the language information as well as an important form to actively get access to information. In modern college English teaching and learning, listening ability is a bottleneck to most of the foreign language learners and it’s also the major obstacle to realize a normal and effective communication. Therefore, how to improve listening comprehension becomes one of the hot research topics in recent years. Experts in this field are trying to explore the effective teaching model of listening improvement, and even trying to alter the listening test model to guide the progress in listening teaching. In 1997, the compound dictation is fixed for the first time and becomes the essential part in the listening then. From the beginning of the 20 th century, Scholars at home and abroad mainly study the dictation as a simple and convenient test method, but as a teaching means, there is no special authority conclusion on how much the dictation affects the improvement of listening ability and how much the dictation affects the effectiveness of listening teaching. At the same time, domestic dictation experiment frequently carried out among students of English majors. In such background, this study proposes the application of dictation practice to English class of non-English majors, which aims to explore an effective method to improve students’ listening competence. Based on the Krashen’s input and output theory and the new reform orientation of CET-4 as the guidance, taking Chang-xi true English papers published by Beijing education press in 2011 as the blueprint, the author selects 15 sets of listening exercises and applies these sets of exercises to the successive classroom teaching. The study tries to explore the effectiveness of the dictation practice on the improvement of English listening competence by contrast tests, data analysis, and questionnaires.This research integrates the qualitative method with the quantitative method. The contrast of pre-post tests is employed to undergo quantitative analysis while questionnaires are selected to elicit qualitative data. There are total 124 participants, randomly selected from two A-level classes in Xi’an Polytechnic University. A2 acts as the experimental group with 59 participants, while class A16 works as the control group with 65 participants. In addition to increase the classroom dictation in the EG, the other teaching methods and content of the two groups are carried out in accordance with the same curriculum and requirements.To ensure there is no apparent distinction of listening between the EG and the CG before the experiment, a pre-test and a questionnaire1 are arranged among all participants. A post-test in EG and CG and a questionnaire2 in EG only are undertaken after 10 weeks’ study. With application of SPSS 19.1 statistical software for data analysis, the results show that the scores in the EG improved more than that in the CG. Through the analysis of questionnaires, the dictation practice, an effective teaching methods is widely accepted by students in the EG. At the same time, most of the students agree that the classroom dictation practice, an effective teaching method, can not only improve the listening competence, but also can be a very good way to improve vocabulary spelling ability and insisting for a long time is to help them improve their comprehensive foreign language abilities.