Dictation Practice: ESL Writing and Listening Activity

Are you looking for a simple writing and listening activity that you can use for just about any level of English learner? Then dictation practice should certainly be an ESL activity that you consider. Keep on reading for all the details about how to do it with your students and get ready for some ESL teaching gold!

Dictation ESL Writing and Listening Activity

Skills: Listening/writing
Listening Sub-Skills: Detecting transition signals, note taking, listening for detail, using context to anticipate what comes next
Time: 5-10 minutes
Level: Beginner-advanced
Materials Required: A text to dictate

Dictation can help our students with some important sub-skills, including detecting transition signals (first, second, third, etc.), note taking, and listening for details. It also helps students practice a range of other things, from printing English letters to punctuation, spelling, proof-reading and lay-out.

Dictation can also offer a serious dose of syntax, vocabulary and grammar! In short, it’s an extremely versatile activity. It’s also a nice break from the very communicative activities that dominate most of our textbooks and classes today.

I love to use it for frequency adverbs. I dictate either a question or answer and when students have finished writing them down, they have to write the question if an answer and vice-versa.

The way it works is that you find a writing passage that you’ll read to your students. Or, you could even make up your own on the fly for a truly no-prep activity. In an emergency situation, just grab something off the shelf in the teacher’s office or from your desk and it should work in most cases.

Consider the Textbook or Breaking News English 

However, if you have a wee bit more time, some good sources for writing passages are the textbook you’re using for the class, a website like Breaking News English, or just about anything for that matter! You may even want to write it yourself. The key is finding something at a similar level to your students, or just slightly below.

Read out the passage to your students who write down what they hear. You may have to read it again, depending on the level of your students.

I generally give students a minute or two at the end for proofreading and instruct them to check things like spelling and punctuation. Check answers and correct any errors with spelling, punctuation, etc. Or, you can write the passage on the board or online and students can check their own answers.

Teaching Tip for Lower-Level Students

If you’re teaching beginner level students, it may be a good idea to type out your dictation with single-word fill in the blanks in each sentence. You may even put two possible answers in parentheses after each blank. For example, “Jackie goes to __________ (the beach, the beats).”

If you’re feeling really motivated, and have the time and energy, you can also try making a dictation worksheet with words that only have prefixes and suffixes. Then students must listen and complete the words. This is great for teaching spelling and you can help students learn how to listen/read parts of speech and their particular beginnings and endings.

Explain that if you know how different parts of speech are spelled, for example verbs often end with -ing, then you can more easily write down what you’re listening to. On tests, you can guess the meaning of a word more effectively if you know what part of speech it might belong to.

Teaching Tip for Higher-Level Students

For intermediate and advanced students, it’s important to help them learn skills like anticipating what comes next in the dictation. Teach and review briefly things like collocations (high frequency groupings of words) that students can use to reduce stress and anxiety when listening. Give an example like, “How are _____ _____? (you today). Tell students to think about the context of the listening dictation. Context + collocations can often help them fill in words they might have missed writing down.

Teaching Tip for Teaching Listening Strategies

Also, often the easiest and fastest way to find listening strategies to teach students is to break down into micro-skills and strategies what you would do if you were a student in your own class. If you really want to challenge students, paraphrasing or summarizing the dictation passage are incredibly useful skills. These skills are often weak or unpracticed for many of our students.

Ask students to write, for example, a summary of the dictation passage in one sentence that has the main idea and maybe a few key details. Be sure that you have a summary sentence of your own to show students as an ideal example if you do this.

Procedure for Dictation Writing Activity:

1. Choose a passage that you’ll read to your students.
2. Read the passage and students have to write down what they hear.
3. Give students some time for proofreading and then optionally, they can compare with a partner.
4. If you have a digital copy of the dictation text on your computer, copy/paste it into a PPT slide. Put this up on the screen after the dictation for students to check their work.
5. If you suspect that some/many students aren’t bothering to check and correct their errors, tell them you’re going to collect their papers and for every 3 uncorrected errors you find, they will lose a point from their participation grade at the end of the course. Or something along those lines. Most students will suddenly be extremely focused on checking their work for accuracy and fixing any errors they have made

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Have your Say about this ESL Listening and Writing Activity

What are your thoughts about dictation? Is it a winner or do you have another writing or listening ESL activity that you’d like to recommend to us. Leave a comment below and let us know what you think. We’d love to hear from you.

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Last update on 2020-10-30 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API