The verb ‘to dictate’ is not one that teachers warm to. This is because we love to foster creativity in our children and to get them to write their own ideas. BUT when teaching children how to read and spell we need to use all the best tools we have to instruct our beginner readers and dictation is one of these great tools. Why?
Dictation is a controlled activity in which the teacher chooses a word or sentence for the learner to write. By choosing the word or sentence, the teacher can focus on practising a specific skill or knowledge that the child needs to rehearse in order to transfer it from working memory to long-term memory. This controlled activity ensures that the child succeeds, as the teacher can remove or assist with any spellings that they have not yet learnt. The learner can then utilise what they have learnt with success and this will encourage him/her to repeat this successful approach in his/her own independent writing.
What does dictation promote?
- Consolidation of the Alphabetic Principle. Dictation is an encoding activity. It encourages the learner to translate sounds he/she can hear into symbols he/she has learnt to associate with those sounds. As the child does this, he/she is learning that letters spell sounds in words. This is the Alphabetic Principle and how our writing system was created and works.
- Trust in phonics teaching. When a carefully selected word or sentence is dictated to a learner, and the learner succeeds in transcribing the spoken word into letters, he/she will be able to read what is written and thus buy into using sound/letter knowledge to spell words. It will demonstrate that phonics works, so he/she will use it.
- Expectation to match letters and sounds. When a learner begins to spell words correctly and can read them with ease, this develops the understanding that all words are decodable. It is just a question of learning the spellings that represent the sounds in words. It is magic to see children realise that they can read what they have written and, what’s more, other people can too! (I remember the bad old days when young pupils were encouraged to use inventive spellings. They would write whole reams of stories which were totally undecipherable!)
- Consolidation of letter/sound bonds. Research has shown that the physical, motoric action of writing and spelling helps children store and consolidate letter/sounds bonds. This is more effective than using screens. The multi-sensory experience of sounding out a word while forming letters seems to create further links in the brain and thus transfer the letter/sound bonds to long-term memory. At a later stage, this activity also helps children to remember which alternative spelling fits in which word – e.g., ‘chick’ or ‘chik’ or ‘chic’?
- Success. When a learner succeeds, they will buy into the method and stick with it. Dictation is a guaranteed way to show children they can succeed, as the teacher can ensure they have the knowledge and skills to succeed (by teaching them to the spellings and also to blend and segment) before they demonstrate this in their dictated sentences.
Dictation scaffolding – from simple to complex
As with everything we teach that is difficult we need to scaffold the progression in dictation tasks. We have free dictation sentences which progress in small incremental steps. Note that some common high-frequency words may have spellings that the children have not learnt yet. We suggest the teacher writes these on the board for children to see. These words can be mapped into letter/sounds correspondences so that when the children are ready to read and spell the words they will be able to segment them and spell them independently. For example, if the words ‘i s’ and ‘h i s’ are segmented for the children they will soon learn that the letter ‘s’ represents the sound /z/ as in other words: ‘as’, ‘has’ and ‘was’, for example. This way they are building their knowledge of the Alphabetic Code.
Step 1 – CVC words
The first slide starts with CVC words, so children will need to know the sounds of the alphabet and to blend and segment CVC words. As you can see, the high-frequency words with spellings the children may not have learnt yet are: ‘the’, ‘is’, ‘a’ and ‘his’.
Step 2 – VCC words
Step 3 – CVCC words
To see all our free dictation sentences, click on the links below:
We hope you find these resources helpful!
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