DigCompEdu Competence area

4.1 Assessment strategies

Progression Level

Integrator (B1)

Minimum digital skills level of Students

A1

Minimum digital skills level of Educators

B1

Learning/Teaching situation

To add interactive assessment tools.

Target group

Teachers who want to add interactive assessment features.

Ingredients

  • PC/laptop
  • Internet connection
  • Access to a hosting platform for H5P content

Description

Dictation has been a feature of language classrooms for hundreds of years. However, for many teachers these days, the word ‘dictation’ is synonymous with ‘old-fashioned’, ‘boring’, and ‘teacher-centred’.

Dictation has numerous uses in language courses, often involving very little preparation and a lot of creativity and interest. Used imaginatively, it can be an effective tool for working on accuracy and fluency in all skills.

There are several reasons why dictation activities work well in the classroom. From the teacher’s point of view, dictations:

– Can be done with any level, depending on the text used
– Can be graded for a multi-level class

How to do it (step by step)

Step 1

Interactive video

You can add audio samples containing a sentence for dictation and enter the correct transcription. Your students can listen to the samples and enter what they have heard into a text field. Their answers will be evaluated automatically.

 Select the sentences:
The goal of the exercise is for a student to write down these sentences correctly based on audio they hear.

 

Step 2

Create dictation activity:
Select the New content option and choose Dictation from the list of Content types

Step 3

Task description:
In the Task description field, we give the learner basic instructions or introduce the problem to be solved. We’ll use this text for the Task description: It’s dictation time! This is a very simple exercise. Just click on the audio play buttons below, listen to the samples and type what you heard.

Step 4

Audio:
For each sentence (step 1), you will add two audio files, one where you read the sentence with average reading speed and another, alternative, where we read the sentence with slow speed. You can use any device to record this audio (PC’s microphone or smartphone or tablet).

Step 5

Finishing up:
Edit the behavioural settings as you need and then publish your activity.

There is more…

 

Audacity is a free software for recording and editing audio files.

 

Read this tutorial for recoding audio in your computer : https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/tutorial_recording_audio_playing_on_the_computer.html

 

See Also

Listen and Write (https://www.listen-and-write.com/audio) is a website you can find a lot of ideas for your dictation assessments.