Dictogloss



=**Dictogloss...** = Dictogloss is an instructional tool designed to draw the language learners’ attention to language form (Wajnryb, 1990) by promoting negotiation of meaning as well as negotiation of form. Dictogloss task gives learners opportunities to talk about grammar in order to complete the task (Wajnryb, 1990; Kowal & Swain, 1994). In general, Dictogloss has a four-stage procedure to administrate in a classroom: preparation, dictation, reconstruction, and analysis with correction (Wajnryb, 1990). In the first stage, students are asked to have a discussion of the topic and vocabulary that they are listening to, followed by the teachers’ dictation of the passage at natural speed. Students can take notes for reconstruction. In reconstruction stage, students are asked to be in groups and discuss what they heard and wrote and by doing so, they reconstruct their own written version of the passage that should be grammatically accurate. In analysis stage, students compare their version of writing and correct it by the whole class.

=**According to Janet Allen...** = Janet follows the original procedure of Dictogloss first suggested by Wajnryb (1990) in her ‘How Does It Work?’ section. But, she more attends to two specific purposes for this activity: student recognition of familiar language and refinement of students’ ability to work with others to reconstruct a version of the text from their shared lists of words (Allen, pg. 36). In particular, she pointed out that this strategy is helpful for English language learners with background for content reading by giving them chances to be exposed to content or text-specific vocabulary and dig into the meaning and its usage as well as giving them an opportunity to collaborate with their peers.

=**According to Yun...** = However, given that the purpose of Dictogloss in this book is to have students learn acquire academic vocabulary, Janet’s intact application of original version of Dictogloss, which is intended for improving students’ grammar awareness in listening and speaking language skills, needs to be carefully considered. It is not enough for students to discuss and combine the familiar words they attended and took notes while listening to the passage to recreate the passage without conceptualizing and understanding the meaning in context where the words are used. Also, there is a chance that students share their notes and fill the missing parts by seeing others’ notes without discussing the context, which is supposed to be the main purpose of this strategy.

In addition, although Janet mentions by herself that this is quite good for English language learners (ELLs) to improve background knowledge, the actual application to ELLs has difficulties because ELLs are usually not taught separately in school and they immersed in classes where majority of students are native English speakers. This means that Dictogloss requires students to have a certain degree of language proficiency already in order to get the content of the passage as well as the meaning of academic vocabulary. So, it seems necessary for teachers to have meaning-based follow-up activities which can make up for lack of understanding. The follow-up activities might include further discussion on keywords with context, brainstorming the topic of the passage with the vocabulary they attended in the Dictogloss, or semantic mapping of each keyword. Also, as Wajnrub (1990) recommends, integration of testing and teaching helps to stimulate the learners’ motivation. Specifically, rather than having the teacher select specific grammatical features and have the students practice them, the students identify their grammar problems and the teacher teaches in response to their needs.

Dictogloss is effective to foster several important principles of language learning such as learner autonomy, cooperation among learners, focus on meaning and self and peer-assessment (Vasiljevic, 2010). However, because it is originally designed to develop second language listening and speaking skills, care is needed in the application of this in academic vocabulary learning with the additional focus of vocabulary meaning in context.

__** References **__ Wajnryb, R. (1990). //Grammar Dictation//. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kowal, M., & Swain, M. (1994). Using collaborative language production tasks to promote students’ language awareness. //Language Awreness, 3,// 73-93.

Vasiljevic, Z. (2010). Dictogloss as an interactive method of teaching listening comprehension to L2 learners. //English Language Teaching, 3//(1), 41-52.

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