The Effect Of Dictogloss On Senior High School Students' Grammatical Accuracy

With the current inclination in second language acquisition(SLA)practice towards Communicative Language Learning(CLT),learners' communicative competence and receptive skills have been greatly improved,however,there is a growing concern that the importance of language accuracy may be undermined to a certain degree.Confronted with this worrisome problem,dictogloss,also known as grammar dictation,is proposed by Ruth Wajnryb and gained its popularity around the world.Dictogloss is a text-based,task-based and learner-centered focus-on-form task employed in a group of three or four,which aims to help students learn,use and master the target language on the basis of the text while emphasizing both the meaning and the form of the language.Although a large number of studies focus on its theoretical mechanism and effectiveness on language skills development and specific linguistic items learning,there are few empirical studies on the effect of dictogloss on senior high school students' grammatical accuracy.Based on this,the overall research questions would concentrate on whether dictogloss is an effective focus-on-form task for Chinese senior high school students and what grammatical forms the EFL learners mainly focus on during the implementation of dictogloss.Since it proves that the occurrence of language-related episodes(LREs)can be used to materialize and elicit learners' grammatical noticing in focus-on-form research,learners' LREs in the reconstruction stage of the dictogloss task would also be the critical concerns to have a better understanding of the students' interlanguage development.Specifically,three questions are put forward:(1)Does dictogloss effectively develop EFL learners' grammatical accuracy in Chinese senior high schools?(2)Is there any correlation between learners' proficiency levels and their grammatical focuses of LREs?(3)And how do LREs vary? Namely,what are thegrammatical forms learners mostly focus on when they engage in the dictogloss task?And what are the outcomes of their LREs?In response to these research questions,18 students from the same class participated in the experiment and they were divided into two experimental groups(learners of upper-intermediate and lower-intermediate proficiency level)based on their proficiency levels.And after a practice session,dictogloss was implemented once a week during their listening demo classes.Each time a passage was listened and written,and the duration was 20 minutes.The teaching procedures were kept as close to the procedures described by Wajnryb as possible.And the pre-test and post-test on students' grammatical accuracy were performed before and after the experiment.In line with the research questions,all the scores of learners' tests were recorded and analyzed by The Statistical Package for the Social Package(SPSS,version 22.0)and learners' interaction in the reconstruction stage was recorded and transcribed into texts,and then the LREs were identified,classified and coded step by step.The results indicate that upper-intermediate learners generated more LREs than lower-intermediate learners.Moreover,no matter what language proficiency level the students are,they tended to focus more on morpho-syntactic forms than lexical forms.In the lexical concerns of the LREs,lower-intermediate learners asked for the meaning of a word or expression much more frequently than upper-intermediate learners did.In terms of morpho-syntactic forms,for the upper-intermediate,verb tenses/aspect/form was the main focus while for the lower-intermediate,reconstruction was the main focus.Concerning the outcomes of the LREs,the experiment results imply that more than half of the LREs(about 60%)are correctly resolved.These findings verify that dictogloss is an effective and feasible technique in grammar instruction and yield important implications for senior high school teachers.