Date of Award

1984

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Abstract

This research was designed to examine the effects of dictation exercises on the scores of developmental students on a test of a specific English writing skill. Additionally, the study examined the differences in these scores based on the preference type scales of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) in order to test the hypothesis that certain MBTI types that handle the oral language well would learn writing skills faster when exposed to dictation exercises related to those skills. A pre-test and a post-test were administered to three groups of developmental writing students at Nicholls State University. All three groups were taught writing skills using the controlled composition method which emphasizes imitation and proofreading skills as well as the developmental writing student's facility with the oral language. One treatment group received teacher-rated, student-copied dictation exercises during the 10-day period of the experiment. The second treatment group had dictation delivered by a videotape player and television monitor utilizing a professional dictation voice with the words of the dictation on the video screen. The third group, a control group, received no dictation exercises. The writing skill presented in the classes was the correct use of present progressive, present, past and future tenses. The MBTI scores indicated the subjects' tendencies toward extroversion or introversion and sensing or intuition. It was expected that the extroversion and sensing groups would benefit the most from dictation exercises. Analysis of the data was developed through an analysis of covariance program that used the pre-test as a covariate in order to refine the significance of the variance of the post-test scores. An additional analysis of covariance was applied to the data using the MBTI scores to develop a factorial design. Results of the analysis of covariance indicated that there was no statistically significant difference among the three groups or among the various MBTI factorial interactions among the groups. An analysis of variance of the mean gains did show a statistically significant difference for the video dictation group compared to the control group. The use of dictation exercises, especially video dictation, is marginally supported by this study.

Pages

148

DOI

10.31390/gradschool_disstheses.3970

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