The following article comes from Julie Sutcliffe, Education Development Lead (MFL) at the Global School Alliance.
When I sat my German A-level many years ago, I remember undertaking a “Nacherzählung” – an exercise in which we listened to a detailed account in German two or three times and then rewrote it using our own words. Fast forward to the new GCSE for Modern Foreign Languages (MFL), set to be examined in 2026, and students will engage in a dictation activity. While not as lengthy or demanding as the “Nacherzählung,” this task’s focus on listening and sound-spelling recognition evokes memories of past language-learning methods.
Dictation is far from a new concept. Many language teachers have employed it for years, not just as a means to test students’ ability to transcribe what they hear, but as a versatile tool that enhances various aspects of language acquisition. This seemingly simple activity – where teachers read words, phrases, or sentences in the target language, and students write them down – involves a complex set of skills: attentive listening, comprehension, and the ability to transcribe words and sentences quickly and accurately..
Dr. Gianfranco Conti is a strong advocate of dictation, having used it for over 30 years to develop decoding and listening skills, as well as to foster metalinguistic awareness, vocabulary acquisition, and syntactic knowledge. Dictation is a key component of his Extensive Processing Instruction model. It hones the bottom-up processing skills essential to listening: phonemic, syllabic, segmenting, lexical, and syntactic processing, as outlined in the book Breaking the Sound Barrier by Dr. Gianfranco Conti and Steve Smith.
A major advantage of dictation is its accessibility and minimal preparation requirements for teachers. Since it can be delivered at a controlled pace with variations in intonation and segmentation, teachers can adapt it to address specific student difficulties. It also enables targeted practice of particular grammatical structures, phonetic patterns, and sound-spelling correspondences.
One of my favourite classroom dictation activities is Delayed Dictation, where the teacher reads a phrase or sentence in the target language, but the student has to hold it in their memory for 5 or 10 seconds before writing it down. This activity leverages two well-established cognitive mechanisms: the Zeigarnik Effect and the ‘Desirable Difficulty’ principle.
- The Zeigarnik Effect (Zeigarnik, 1927) suggests that incomplete tasks create a cognitive tension that enhances retention and recall. By interrupting the dictation process, delayed dictation fosters this tension, potentially improving memory retention.
- Desirable Difficulties, a concept developed by R. A. Bjork (1994), proposes that introducing challenges during learning enhances long-term retention. Delayed dictation embodies this principle by requiring students to hold information in working memory and rehearse it before transcribing.
Other effective dictation exercises include:
- Partial dictation: Students transcribe only specific words or phrases from a sentence.
- Spot the missing word: Students listen to a sentence and identify an omitted word.
- Paired dictation (information gap-fill): Students work in pairs to fill in missing information.
To support your GCSE classes, I have compiled a series of resources featuring sentences derived from the prescribed vocabulary lists. These can be used flexibly with different dictation activities to reinforce language learning.
P.S. Dr. Conti also recommends Dictogloss, an activity in which students reconstruct a short text by listening and noting key words, which then serve as a foundation for text reconstruction. Perhaps the “Nacherzählung” isn’t entirely a thing of the past after all!
