How to Improve Dictation
For students learning English as a second language, or studying another foreign language, taking dictation can be an important skill in the learning process. Taking dictation involves writing down, word-for-word, what a speaker says. In this way, it can help you identify the links between the written and the spoken language. However, hearing a language spoken after reading it (and vice versa) can be a confusing process, and there are several ways of helping you improve your dictation skills.
Instructions
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Start online. Before you try to understand dictation as read by a live person, who (even if she repeats the text several times) will read in different ways and perhaps with slightly different pronunciations, begin your work online. Websites such as the English Club offer dictations for students of English as a Second Language (ESL), providing both audio files as well as accompanying transcripts to correct your work. This will allow you to repeat the dictation as many times as you wish, letting you hear where you made mistakes.
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Work with different levels. Using a program that has several different levels of language practice, with different lengths of audio and a variety of vocabulary, will help you progress more quickly in language study than you will if you were to just stay at one level.
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Work with a particular person. After you have progressed to the point where you can understand most recorded dictations upon hearing them two or three times, begin to work with a person. Whether this is a private tutor, a friend, or someone over the Internet, she should be a native speaker of the language. Have her find texts that you do not know and read them to you slowly, at a pace where you have the time to write down what you hear.
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Carefully correct your work. Dictations will not be useful if you do not correct your work; correcting your transcript of what you heard against the official transcript, or version that the reader dictated from, will help you learn from your mistakes. If at all possible, listen to the dictation once again with the corrected version of your work.
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References
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