Assessing Listening Skills and Spelling with Dictation
Bottom-up Processing – Dictation in TESOL
For those of us who have studied or taught in traditional language learning classrooms, we are likely familiar with dictation as a form of assessment. For lower levels, word lists are often used. The teacher simply reads out a list of pre-taught terms, and students copy down what they hear and have memorized. Correction focuses on spelling of the new terms and possibly identifying the part of speech. This is a bottom-up type of processing whereby students are listening for single morphemes and syllables, and copying out the full words they hear.