Spanish Dictation is one of the most traditional techniques in the language class. Consists of the student transcribing an oral text. In its most conventional form, the teacher is the source of the oral text. At SPANiCENTER we offer you a wide variety of Spanish dictation, A2 level. To get the maximum benefit from dictations in Spanish, you must follow the following procedure:
- First, you will see a video that you can listen to as many times as you want.
- At the bottom of the video, you will find some activities where you can write your transcription of the Spanish dictation.
- There are also listening comprehension activities. These activities are made up of questions about the content of the audio.
- Afterwards, our team of teachers will correct your transcription and your response to the listening activities and you will receive the answers in your email.
Why is it important to do these activities?
This technique, associated with traditional language teaching, was practically cornered with the appearance of the first communicative approaches. However, its usefulness has subsequently been reconsidered, foreign languages teachers, consider it today as a valid technique, among many possible ones, with its qualities and limitations.
Its usefulness is to test the student’s perceptual capacity, that is. His ability to identify phonemes and words, and spelling competence. It also serves as a practice of auditory recognition of vocabulary or grammar elements already taught.
In the choice of texts to be dictated, it is important to take into account their adaptation to the level of linguistic competence of the students. Obviously, it does not matter that the student makes spelling mistakes in words that he has never seen in his written form. What is relevant is that the transcription is phonologically justified. For example, in Spanish, the letter h is prone to spelling confusion, as are the phonemes that can correspond to two letters, such as j / g, ll / y, b / v and c / z.
Criteria of Spanish Dictation
The dictations can be done in the classroom in different variants depending on the following criteria:
Depending on who is the source of the oral text. The sender can be the teacher, a student or an audio recording.
Depending on who the transcribing receivers are. The sender can address the entire class, a group or a partner.
Depending on the length of the text to be transcribed. The dictation may consist of the student transcribing letters of incomplete words, a series of isolated words, word holes in incomplete sentences, sentences that are part of an incomplete text, or the text full.
These variables can be combined and result in multiple dictation variants. For example, in group dictation, a student dictates the entire text to his classmates. Another variant is to divide the text into as many fragments as there are students. In this way, the issuer role rotates, so that at the end of the exercise, everyone has dictated and everyone has written.
In all dictations, the auditory perception of the student who writes is tested. When the dictator is a student, the accuracy and intelligibility of his pronunciation is also tested. Finally, it is worth making two points. Firstly, transcribing in a foreign language is tiring for the student: for this reason it is not recommended that the texts be long. Secondly, that a Spanish dictation A1 level in no case can be considered as an activity of written expression.
