Terri on dictée and memory

~ cijohn ~ Leave a comment

I had been wondering whether homeschoolers use dictée. Turns out they do.

Here’s Terri: 

Fwiw, many classical homeschoolers do dictee. (Writing with Skill, the writing program by Susan Wise Bauer of Well Trained Mind fame emphasizes it, for instance.)

But it’s more for training kids to hold larger and larger chunks of information in memory.

I do a version of this with my freshmen students. I’ll post an example later. In my case the idea is to help them absorb the phrase-and-clause structure of formal prose. I ask them to write the sentence chunk-by-chunk instead of word-by-word.

I wonder whether dictée exercises are common in foreign language classes.

French L2 classes use dictée. At least, French classes do here in France. I don’t know about French classes in the U.S.

Ed learned French in France, and one of the standard classroom exercises was to listen to a sentence on a filmstrip, then write it from memory. He said it was incredibly hard to do, and incredibly useful, too.

Speaking of, I did my first dictée today. 

I see why French grownups are united in mild dictée-related PTSD.  

And see:
Le Dictée

Katharine on listening in French

~ cijohn ~ 2 Comments

This makes perfect sense:

I’ve often wondered how the level of French mastery you need to make sense of oral French compares with that for other languages. French is my best language, but, when it comes to rapid speech, I often find it easier to follow oral German.

One area where things that sound the same in French–and complicate things for native and nonnative speakers alike–are verb endings. All of the following endings, for example, share the same “close e” sound: -er, -é, -ée, –ai, -ais, -ait, -aient. So the following forms of the verb “to walk” all sound the same:

marcher: infinitive of “walk”
marché: past participle of “walk”
marchée: feminine singular of the past participle of “walk”
marchai: first-person singular past historic of “walk”
marchais: first and second person singular imperfect indicative of “walk”
marchait: third person singular imperfect indicative of “walk”
marchaient: third person plural imperfect indicative of “walk”

Because of this, the French dictée is as much an exercise in grammar as it is in spelling.

I often drop in on Camille Chevalier’s French Today website. (I’ve also bought her first book).

I recall her saying that French parents “are always teaching their children grammar” or words to that effect.

I wonder if this is what she was talking about ?

btw, she has a fabulous post about teaching French to a woman with memory problems that I’ll link to as soon as I get to it. Very interesting.

And see:
Adventures in Listening Comprehension
Katharine on listening in French
Google Master on le dictée