The Effects of Dictogloss Tasks on EFL Learners’ Syntactic Development*

* This research was supported by the research funds of Chonbuk National University. Jaewoo Shim received the fund in 2017 and Heechul Lee in 2018.

Maya Hyunjeong Lee, Jaewoo Shim & Heechul Lee**

https://doi.org/10.24303/lakdoi.2018.26.2.175

** The first author is Maya Hyunjeong Lee, the corresponding author, Jaewoo Shim, and the third author, Heechul Lee.

∣ Maya Hyunjeong Lee, Jaewoo Shim & Heechul Lee

The Effects of Dictogloss Tasks on EFL Learners’ Syntactic Development ∣

(Chonbuk National University)

Lee, Maya Hyunjeong; Shim, Jaewoo & Lee, Heechul. (2018). The effects of dictogloss tasks on EFL learners’ syntactic development. The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, 26(2), 175-197. The study aimed to investigate if bottom-up process based dictogloss tasks made any significant differences to the syntactic development of learners’ target language and to discuss what factors contributed to the changes in the length and the complexity of their utterances. The data were collected from a group of three university students who were taking an English course at a large national university in South Korea. The salient interaction patterns were isolated and coded and analyzed using T units. To ensure the trustworthiness of the study, multiple sources of data, such as classroom observations and interviews, were also collected and examined. The T unit analysis revealed that some learners benefitted from dictogloss activities as shown in their increased T units and constant engagement with form, their increase in parsing and processing ability, and their active negotiation of meaning through collaborative dialogue.

Key Words: Top-down, bottom-up, authentic input, dictogloss, syntactic development

1. Introduction

With the advent of the communicative language teaching movement, in which meaning over form, fluency over accuracy, and task completion over focus on language were emphasized, meaning based top-down processes were considered to be a critical in listening classrooms (Nation & Newton, 2009; Richard, 2005; Wilson, 2003). The experiences with this meaning-based listening process have provided a fundamental platform for second language comprehension and content learning (Nation & Newton, 2009) but teachers and researchers often have experienced and reported that the quality of the students’ spoken output in response to listening has not demonstrated the desired accuracy, complexity, and sophistication albeit having considerable hours of communicative language instructions (McDonough, 2004; Swain, 1999). Those of the intermediate students whom I met in academic listening courses were in the similar situation in that while they said they understood the authentic news article without specific difficulties, what they actually understood turned out to be a vague idea about the topic which was often plagued by their preformed topical knowledge. In other words, students often make sense of a spoken message by guessing from context or even a few words and rather than by paying attention to the grammatical form of the message or detailed information (Nation & Newton, 2009). Acknowledging the situation, the current research was initiated to seek the ways in which language teachers could assist the students, who often expressed their situation being in impasse in their target language (TL) development, to improve their listening ability to comprehend the level of desired details, while attending to the linguistic properties of the authentic input in its accuracy and sophistication for their later use.

To address the abovementioned problems, the present study examined how the two way required information exchange tasks (Pica & Doughty, 1985) called dictogloss was used in a listening course. Introduced by Wajnryb (1990) and Wilson (2003), dictogloss is a task in which a group of students reconstructs the text together by adding pieces of information that they have heard depending on their varying degree of listening ability. Although it shares similar information processes with dictation, it differs, in that, it involves the essence of communicative language teaching (CLT), which is characterized by authenticity, learner-centeredness, and task-orientedness. In its mechanism, learners receive the spoken input, store it in their short-term memory, and take note. Using the note as a reference, students as a group try to reconstruct the whole text by means of active verbal interaction. Traditionally, the spoken input was given by the teacher's reading of the text but, this study used the authentic media input since the proficiency of the target students was intermediate who are capable of gaining and in need of obtaining a wide range of topics, vocabulary, discourse, and pragmatic features of the language which modified text cannot accommodate (Brinton, 2001; Crossley, Louwerse, McCarthy, & McNamara, 2007; Gilmore, 2007).  Furthermore, the benefit of using authentic texts are extended to the affective aspect of language teaching and learning in that it promotes and sustains a language learning motivation which is considered to be a necessity for the TL acquisition (Gilmore, 2007; Melvin & Stout, 1987; Nunan, 1999).

Drawing on the observations made concerning both the effects of the type of listening process and the authentic input, the study examined the research questions of whether the dictogloss tasks using the authentic media input enhanced learners' TL syntactic development, in terms of the length and the complexity of the utterances, which is one of the major goals of the course. Furthermore, the present study discussed the primary factors contributing to the change in learners' syntactic properties.

2. Literature Review

The research involving dictogloss tasks is largely discussed in relation to two different but often concurrently occurring language learning conditions: noticing (Prince, 2013; Schmidt, 1990, 2001; Skehan, 1998) and interaction (Kuiken & Vedder, 2002; LaPierre, 1994). As a two way required information exchange task, dictogloss is expected to provide learners with opportunities to process the spoken input despite their lack of linguistic and pragmatic command on TL through the active verbal interaction (Ellis, 2008; Yilmaz & Granena, 2010). Nonetheless, the empirical research on the effects of dictogloss tasks on second language acquisition (SLA) is comparatively few in the situation where systematic pedagogical approaches in ESL and EFL listening is difficult to find (Field, 2003; Prince, 2013).

2.1. Noticing

Noticing is a key construct in the cognitive approaches in SLA. The role of noticing in the input is most well defined by the early work of Schmidt (1990, 1995) and by Skehan’s (1998) information processing model. Schmidt (1995) stated that the input that is not attended cannot be held in the memory system for further processing so that conscious attention given to input is crucial in TL acquisition. Although his stance over the role of awareness and attention has been modified and elaborated in his later work (2001), his key argument remained the same and that is noticing is “the necessary and sufficient condition for converting input into intake" (1990, p. 129). Similarly, Skehan (1998) also asserted that learners’ awareness of linguistic forms in the input mediates the successful language learning and he further expounded that the frequent and salient features of the input assist noticing along with other variables, such as classroom instruction, task demands on processing resources, individual differences, and readiness to pay attention to certain linguistic forms. The role of noticing is also found in the forced output and it has been mostly elaborated by the work of Swain (2000, 2001).  She claimed that when learners are forced to produce output, they engage the gap between what they intended to produce and what their interlanguage allows them to produce. Thus, noticing the gap in their interlanguage has a potentially significant role especially in the development of syntax and morphology (Kowal & Swain, 1997).

Several empirical research has reported the role of noticing in dictogloss tasks and most of their qualitative data demonstrated the positive results. According to Kowal and Swain (1997), their 7th and 8th grade learners in French immersion setting actively engaged in form by means of metatalk during dictolgoss tasks. Although their engagement was wider than any particular linguistic features which the instructor intended to improve, Swain stated that students noticed things they did not know or could not say to their own satisfaction and this notice of gap led to the potential uptake. Lapkin and Swain (2010) examined the students’ written text during both visually stimulated jigsaw and auditorily stimulated dictogloss tasks and reported that the jigsaw students used approximately 60% reflective verbs correct whereas the dictogloss students did up to 90% correct. The study indicated that the participants noticed the rich grammatical and lexical features that dictogloss provided and used them correctly in their written performance. Similarly, Yeo (2002), tested Korean 90 university students on their understanding of English participle adjective –ng and –ed, and their post-test results revealed that the treatment group using dictogloss tasks outperformed the other treatment group with input-enhancement tasks. The study demonstrated that noticing in dictogloss enhanced students’ use of morpho-syntactic knowledge. Most recently, Prince (2013) reported that his adult students in the mixed group of proficiency demonstrated the progress in reconstructing the text, in terms of the length of the intelligible written units measured by the number of words written under the three different variant conditions of dictogloss tasks. He concluded that the use of dictogloss improved listeners’ understanding and retention of spoken English.

2.2. Interaction

Interaction in small group work has been studied with the emphases of both interactionist perspectives and socio-cultural perspectives. According to interactionist perspectives, it proposes that conversational interaction which includes peer interaction enables learners to negotiate both form and meaning while they are engaging in meaning-based activities (Pica, Lincoln-Porter, Paninos, & Linnell, 1996). This negotiated interaction with more competent interlocutor triggers acquisition “because it connects input, learners’ cognitive capacity, particularly selective attention, and output. (Long, 1996, p. 451)” In other words, the verbal interaction is a key interlanguage process, by means of proposing, rejecting, or confirming learners’ hypothesis on the use of linguistic features, which in turns leads to a TL acquisition. One of the empirical research concerning the role of interaction on language acquisition was found in Kuiken and Vedder (2002)’s study. Testing the effect of the student-student interaction appeared in dictogloss tasks on the adult learners’ passive construction, they reported that although their quantitative data failed to reveal any statistically significant differences between the one group with interaction and the other group with individual work on the recognition and frequency of use of passive, their qualitative analysis demonstrated numerous evidence that the opposite could be true. What it means is that their discourse analysis data confirmed that students did focus on form while searching for the correct structures although their final written outcome did not demonstrate their collective attempts during the task. It was assumed that learners’ lack of confidence in drawing the rules out of their newly noticed forms might be the reason for such discrepancies and this finding led the authors to conclude that teachers’ feedback was fundamentally important to lead those collective effort on noticing to acquisition. In the same vein, LaPierre (as cited in Swain, 2000) provided the important evidence for the usefulness of collaborative dialogue as a group and she found that metatalk that the participants used to compete the assigned dictogloss tasks led a significant linguistic uptake. She asserted that the specific linguistic features that were noticed and treated collectively as a group were exactly represented in the delayed production. Although the results also indicate the absolute necessity of teacher’s feedback on student-student interaction, it became evident that collaborative dialogue during dictogloss task affected the students’ linguistic outcome.

Another theoretical perspective emphasizing the role of interaction in language learning is socio-cultural theory. Prompted by the work of Vygotsky (1987), researchers viewed that learning takes place in the social mediation provided by interaction and it is most effectively occurs along the zone of proximal development (ZPD). The ZPD is commonly referred to as the cognitive distance between what a learner currently can do on his own and what he potentially can do under the collaboration of the expert adults (Goodwin & Duranti, 1992). In a broad sense, this assistance from the expert adult is called scaffolding and it is noted that this scaffolding within ZPD is still possible for peers (Cazden, 1988; Donato 1994). Through interaction, learners may gain insight into not only linguistic knowledge but also pragmatic understanding of language use and in peer interaction, in particular, learners are able to understand other learners’ needs, their focus, and the best way to explain, all of which contributes to each other’s ongoing process of language learning (Nussbaum, Alvarez, McFarlane, Gomez, Claro & Radovic, 2009). Having this socio-cultural perspective as a theoretical underpinning, Lim and Jacobs (2001) conducted a research concerning whether the learners who were instructed and practiced the cooperative group behaviors could provide language scaffolding to their interlocutor during dictogloss tasks. Although their participants could not provide “crafted expert scaffolding” (p. 19), it was found that their 19 girl’s high school students in Singapore increased the overall use of scaffolding strategies and reported their changes in attitudes toward peer interaction and its outcome. Based on the review of the past research, two questions were posited and guided the current study.

1. Do dictogloss tasks using the authentic media input enhance learners’ TL syntactic development?

2. What are the primary factors that influence learners’ syntactic development and in what ways do these factors contribute to the length and the complexity of their utterances?

3. Method

In order to deepen our understanding of how dictogloss tasks using the authentic media input affect the participants’ English syntax development and to discuss the primary factors that contributes to the changes in the structure, the researcher adopted both quantitative and qualitative research methods. To account for the changes in the syntactic properties of the participants’ utterances, the T unit analysis was employed whereas to discuss the primary factors contributing to the abovementioned change, a qualitative research approach through conversation analysis, classroom observations, and interviews was adopted.

3.1. Setting

This study was undertaken at a large national university in South Korea. The course was an elective course held in English education department, so those who participated in the course had either a clear study goal or special interests in spoken English. The course was held in a multimedia classroom two times a week for three hours: two hours on Mondays and one hour on Wednesdays. On Mondays, the class began with listening to a segment of the American sitcom series. Once having completed warm-up activities, the students listened to one to two news stories with pre- and post-listening activities. On Wednesdays, they began by listening to one news story with pre- and post-listening activities. Although the professor was Korean, the medium of class instruction and discussion was English. Dr. So (pseudonym) was a male professor in his fifties and had taught the course for over four years. He identified his role in class as a facilitator so he tried to minimize his influence on students’ group work. After the tasks, he elicited the call on a representative of each group and gave him or her a chance to report back in class what a group had discussed. Everything took place on a voluntary basis and usually, one or two representatives came up to the class and reported the outcome of their dictogloss tasks. As for the requirement of the course, the students should watch two news stories per week from CNN student news and write the log. In addition, they should meet the instructor twice a semester for their teacher-student conferencing with a vocabulary log which they had kept throughout the course.

3.2. Participants

Three students were selected based on their equal participation in a group discussion. They were all male and had different majors; one student (S1) was sophomore majoring in English literature and two others (S2 and S3) were juniors majoring in Engineering. Both S2 and S3 said that it was the first semester off from their military service and S2 took six months to travel several places in the States by himself. He said that upon graduation, he would enter one of the aviation schools in the States to be a pilot. All of them were post-intermediate level whose TOEIC scores were above seven-hundred. Altogether eight times of classroom observations were taken place along with interviews with the participants and the instructor. Prior to recording students' group interaction, the researcher explained the purpose of the study and gained the consent individually. However, they were not informed what the researcher was looking for in their group discussion. Sources of data included six audio transcripts of the group discussion, classroom observation logs, and semi-structured interviews with the students and the professor after class. All the oral interaction for each of the six classes were coded by means of Jefferson's (2004) symbols (see, the appendix) and were transcribed along with the interviews.

3.3. Tasks

The tasks for the pre-listening activity included, for example, jigsaw, silent listening, trivia, parallel reading, and vocabulary study by using word clouds or multiple choice questions. The tasks for the post-listening activity consisted of correcting the corrupted original transcript and discussing the topic addressed in the listening task.

The overall flow of the classroom instruction centered on dictogloss tasks was as follows. In the preparation stage (stage 1), one or two carefully organized pre-listening activities including vocabulary activity were given to the students in preparation for listening to the news story. They were also given the opportunities to discuss possible topics related to the news story which was to be presented. In the meaning stage (stage 2), the students listened to the whole news segment twice which lasted approximately 2'30" (mm:ss). In this stage, the students were encouraged to understand the main ideas through using keywords from the stage 1 and to discuss the main ideas as a group. Then, the teacher divided the whole news into four or five parts and led the students to listen to each one section more than two times. In the listening and note-taking stage (stage 3), the students were guided to listen to each of the divided parts. The students were continually reminded that they should take notes through keywords listening since otherwise, they tried to copy all the words. In the reconstructing stage (stage 4), students in a group work together to reconstruct an approximation of the text from notes. The teacher circulated the class, offering guidance only it was requested. At the comparing stage (stage 5), reconstructed group versions of the texts were compared with the original and any differences that emerged from the stage 4. In both the fourth and the fifth stages, the participants were encouraged to pay close attention to language form (word forms, word order, spellings, and grammar rules) within the context of meaning-focused listening and group work. All the way through, the teacher encouraged the learners to make an interpretive text, not necessarily an exact replica of the original text.

4. Results

To examine how the participants' utterances have changed across the semester in terms of their syntactic complexity and length, the number of syntactic fragments, a single word or phrase standing alone as a whole utterance, used in a group work was first identified. (1), (2), (3) are typical examples of the participants’ use of syntactic fragments appeared during the reconstructing stage. In response to the group members who initiated the talk, the interlocutors replied with a single word or phrase such as a prepositional phrase, an incomplete subordinate clause, and a single adverb respectively. The functions of those fragments vary: as shown in (1), providing a corrective feedback in a manner of recast, in (2), prompting the interlocutor to elaborate or complete his previous unfinished utterance, and in (3), asking for confirmation to if the interlocutor understood the speaker correctly by repeating a part of the speaker’s utterance with a rising intonation.

(1) S1: uh (.) Abby had just learned the life-saving procedure (.5) in her school?
S2: in her (.) helping class	<Excerpt from episode 1>

(2) S2: tried to revived the baby. (writing the words on the piece of paper)
S3: so they=
S2: =they are needing CPR right now     <Excerpt from episode 1>

(3) S1: frantically she started.
S2: fanatically?

S1: frantically (.) 11month old daughter had stopped breathing (.) and frantically she started blablabla        <Excerpt from episode 1>

In the next phase, these identified fragments were compared to the sentence-level utterances by means of T unit analysis. According to Hunt (as cited in Pica & Doughty, 1985), T unit is the shortest grammatical unit that is accepted as a sentence. Technically, it includes an independent clause and its dependent clause such as subordinate clauses and nonclausal structures embedded in it as in (4). In case of conjoined clauses, each clause is counted as one T unit as seen in (5) but when the subject is shared across the several verb phrases, all the clauses are considered to be one T unit as presented in (6). As for fragment, it is an incomplete dependent clause “such as single-word or phrasal utterances as initiation or response as well as false starts and self-repetitions” (Pica & Doughty, 1985, p. 119).

(4) S 1: okay, uh (.) I think, um (.) that video clip, um, shows that the teen girl became a hero. (One T unit)

S 2: um, why? (Zero T unit)

(5) S2: no, no, we should control the stick and you don’t need to put a car in neutral.(Two T units)

(6) S1: I just pushed out my mind, and keep going because it was what I had to do. (One T unit)

In this particular study, T units included not only grammatical structures but non-grammatical ones with three reasons. First, the goal of the comparison was to see the ratio between sentence level utterances and nonclausal dependent units which occurred as turns or as parts of turns. Second, some grammatical items are used so frequently and prevalently yet are too difficult to obtain the full knowledge of their use even to the very advanced L2 speakers. Examples as such were found in the use of articles as in ‘(the) car’s accelerator doesn’t work so it sticks’ or ‘Maybe (the) sudden start is (a) systematic defect but this is (a) mechanical defects’. Third, most of the grammatical errors were minute which should be seen as temporal mistakes rather than permanent errors (Corder, 1967). In other words, the research subjects seemed to know the correct forms yet use them in an incorrect manner during group interaction possibly due to anxiety or (and) the pressure that they felt when they tried to keep up with the natural flow of the speech. Typical examples of this kind included subject-verb agreement, especially when the subject was modified by a long relative clause, as seen in ‘an person who teaches when when we are in accelerator test um (.) stay(s) calm and put(s) car in neutral,’ and misuse in verb tense as in ‘will be assist’.

Parentheses ( ) are used to inform the missing letters which should have been included and underlines __ are used to identify extra letters which should have been omitted to make a grammatically sound utterance.

Analyses of the T units are presented in Table 1 and the percentage of the fragments per total T units is shown in the right-most column alongside the overall information about the research collection and the procedure. As seen in Table 1, the study found that the percentage of the use of fragments in comparison to T units was drastically reduced from the first observation to the last within the range of 120% at the top to 26% at the bottom. What it means is that the participants' use of fragments was drastically reduced as the semester proceeded and this phenomenon was not ceased or reversed in the third and fourth classes where more technical topics such as car operation or various types of sugar compounds were introduced. That is to say, the participants used complete sentences drastically more than fragments as it was shown in the difference between the result of the first two weeks and those of the last three weeks. One thing that drew the researcher's attention was that the abovementioned change took place without any specific instruction given by the teacher in this regard.

Table 1. Percentage of the fragments per total T units

	Topic	Activities	Total duration of *SGW	Fragments/ T units	%of fragments
1st 9/16	Teen girl saved a baby boy.	Word cloud Dictogloss	16:61	93/76	120%
2nd 10/7	Types of movie & eating habits	Trivia Dictogloss	20:36	86/88	98%
3rd 11/11	Nonstop cars	Jigsaw Dictogloss	16:85	39/68	57%
4th 11/18	Sugar battles	Silent listening Dictogloss	12:57	16/62	26%
5th 11/25	Retirement plans	Silent listning Dictogloss	24:24	38/93	41%
6th 12/9	Anger management	Dictogloss Discussion	19:92	17/56	30%

<*SGW: Acronym of small group work>

5. Discussion

The T unit analysis employed in this study revealed that although students demonstrated various syntactic structures which include fragments, the infinite dependent clauses standing alone as a turn, as the semester proceeded, the use of fragments has been drastically reduced and replaced by sentence level utterances. By saying that, however, it is important to note that this trend was set in place even in the absence of any specific teacher-led instruction or comments over the issue. Thus, by looking at the result itself, it becomes difficult to determine what factors contribute to the participants' TL syntactic development. The recursive analysis of the data led the researcher to conclude that the students' conscious engagement on the form, their increased parsing and processing ability, and their negotiation of meaning through collaborative dialogue were all intertwined and influenced the development of syntactic structures.

The evidence of students’ engagement on form appeared across the semester as it is indicated in the passage in (7). Here, S1 corrected S3’ use of transitive verb compare when the non-animate subject was preceded and it was found that S3 noticed his mistake and corrected his utterance by replacing the non-animate with the animate subject. In addition, in case of (8), S3 found that the meaning of S1’s utterance was not complete enough to elaborate the situation and he insisted in supplementing the word ‘her retirement’ in S1’s utterance. At the final utterance, it was shown that S1 not only added more information but also corrected his own mistakes on the use of the verb tense. As seen in both cases, the participants continued to make conscious engagement on form of oneself and of other group members and this type of turn exchanges led them to use more complete and accurate utterances.

(7) S3:Soda or other things so it I think it can’t compare
S1:It can’t be compared?
S3:Yes, but sugar and corn syrup is almost equal, I guess, but they also contain a lot of these=
S1:=Corn syrup has a lot of=
S3:=so I think we can’t compare between two things.

<Excerpt from episode 4>

(8) S1:She hasn’t uh (::) about she hasn’t financial plan
S3:Her retirement
S1:She hasn’t had financial plan=
S3:=her retirement=
S1:=about her retirement.	<Excerpt from episode 5>

The accounts above demonstrated that the study participants continually drew their attention on form without being fully aware of the fact that they were engaged on form. As Swain (2001) puts it, the metatalk happened here in the context of making meaning and served the function of deepening the students’ awareness of forms, rules, and their relationship to the meaning they were trying to express. This finding corresponds to other previous research (Schmidt, 1990, 2001; Skehan, 1998; Kowal & Swain,1997; Kuiken & Vedder, 2002; Prince, 2013; Yeo, 2002), and it confirms the notion that noticing frequently happens in dictogloss and it plays an important role in constructing more complex and accurate utterances.

It was also evident that the participants increased their parsing and processing ability. In their earlier interaction, they demonstrated difficulty in parsing the speech stream. They reported that all words sounded like one word so it was difficult to distinguish word boundaries as seen in (9). In (9), initially the participants could not recognize a group of words which sounded connected. To them, it sounded disperging call which was, in fact, this urgent call. The vowel initial word with the stressed first syllable, urgent, was liaised to the adjacent consonant, this, and in the fast-paced speech stream, the participants could not distinguish one from the other. Only after examining the lexical meaning of the newly formed word in the immediate context and after consulting with the handout, external information, the participants were finally able to succeed in recognizing the words. This type of parsing difficulty indeed disrupted the processing of the large quantity of spoken input and caused the participants to feel stuck not preceding in further listening. This phenomenon, however, was observed till the second episode, about a month after the course began, and was not observed in their later interaction.

(9) S1:=dispation? the manager made disperging call
S2:disperging?
S1:I don't know what it means but I heard like=
S2:=disperging
S1: (flipping the handout to find the word) =urgent? no? uh (.5) maybe urgent? maybe urgent was=
S2:=make sense, right?
S1:yes!
S2:made a urgent call.
S1:made this urgent call?
S2:um
S1:=made this urgent call, not dispersion (.) made this urgent (.) this	urgent is right.	<Excerpt from episode 1>

Although the participants in the present study did not have any particular lecture on lexical segmentation, it is assumed that dictoglss tasks trained their ears through the lengthy exposure of the authentic input and their practice in writing down the words, stressed syllables, that they heard and then matching them to the words that they knew. This lexical segmentation was reported to be one of the most frequently used segmentation strategies by native speakers (Cutler & Carter, 1987) and the finding ties in evidence from Field (2003) that trained learners showed their sensitivity on the rhythmic regularity of TL and “appeared to learn from experience the value of inserting boundaries before stressed syllables without being aware of what they have learned” (p. 5). During the interview, the participants reported that the practice of dictogloss and listening to the massive authentic spoken input in and out of the classroom helped them feel more comfortable when dealing with authentic media input and enabled them to recognize words or even spellings of unknown words in comparatively fast-paced news stories.

The transcript data also revealed that the participants actively construct the meaning collaboratively by completing each other’s unfinished utterances as if they were in chain-talking and prompting other members to elaborate their utterances with series of simple questions. Although these ways to prompt others were hardly considered as crafted scaffolding provided by the TL expert, they indeed contributed to the participants’ acquisition of the TL and engagement in longer and more complex utterances. In the following example (10), S2 answered to S1’s question and then immediately shifted the focus of the discussion to the interview scene in the news. He did it without framing it as a reported speech but using the first person pronoun as if he was the girl in the news. In line 3, it was seen that S3 interrupted S2 to correct and provide accurate information but S3 himself could not finish his utterance due to his limited listening ability. Prompted by S3’s unfinished utterance, S2 again added more information but he was not sure of what came next and left his utterance unfinished. Stimulated by S2’s unfinished utterance, S1 extended further and completed the long utterance the girl in the interview made. In close observation of this turn-taking sequence, it was obvious that the participants’ understanding and retention of the long utterances of the teenage girl in the news was surely limited and they had to work together to come up with the complete utterances. In addition, the process of understanding the accurate expressions did not occur at once through one-time shift from wrong to right but rather all members reached to the completion after wavering among various alternatives. Referring to this type of active involvement in negotiation of meaning, Swain (2001) argued that collaborative dialogue challenges the learners’ interlanguage system and leads them to internalize the new form and usage of the TL as it was seen at the end of the utterances in this speech event. Similarly, Ohta (2001) also noted that this type of dialogue occurred in peers helps learners construct the utterances which are beyond what each could produce individually.

(10) S1: In her what class?
S2: helping? something, and the one thought that I crossed my mind I actually was (.5) it does blablabla, and I had just keep=

S3: =I just had pushed out=

S2: = (agreeing) pushed out (.5) and I keep going and then (::)

S1: =keeping going and because it was what I had to do.

S2: uh (::) and the last sentence is that’s what I had to do.

S1: yes.

S2: right.

S1: that’s what I had to do (.) actually, what if it doesn’t work and I just pushed out, pushed out=

S2: = (writing) pushed out (::) I had just pushed out (::)

S1: =and keeping going =

S2: = (writing)keeping going? out of my mind?

S1: uh (::) I just pushed out on of my mind and keep going because it was what I had to do.

S3: that’s what I had to do?

S1: yes. I just pushed out my mind, and keep going because it was what I had to do.	<Excerpt from episode 1>

Another representative example evidencing collaborative dialogue was in the example (11). In this case, S3 initially presented the main idea of the news story with a caution since he was not confident in what he had listened to. Stimulated by this uncertainty, S1 and S2 tried to construct the meaning together with whatever the resources they had since they too were not sure how sugar and syrup, whose main ingredients and use seemed to be identical in their world knowledge, should be compared. As seen in (11), S2 used series of questions and prompted S3 to refine what he meant by compare between syrup and sugar. In an attempt to provide more information from what he had listened to, S3 spoke longer utterances with more complex lexical items. Although his utterances were hardly more grammatical than his first utterance, it is evident that the participants were prompted by other group members and compelled to provide more evidence to back up their prior statement. In this particular incidence, the participants came up with more accurate information expressed by more grammatically sound utterances after the second round of the listening and again after another series of turn-taking sequence.

(11) S3: This I was wondering this topic is compare between syrup and sugar?

S1: corn syrup?

S3: syrup means (::)

S2: what do they compare between things?

S3: maybe syrup is from corn but sugar is chemical.

S2: what is healthier?

S3: I wonder big topic is better off sweeteners, so sugar is also sweetener, so I wonder compare to sugar and artificial syrup and sugar is better sweetener, and I wonder this is the topic.   <Excerpt from episode 4>

6. Conclusion and Implication

Although conclusions are limited by the small sample size, this study contributes to an understanding how the participants’ experience of bottom-up based dictogloss tasks and of the massive authentic input could bring a significant change in the use of TL syntactic structures. While it is commonly believed that students should learn how to process top-down information and how to utilize compensatory strategies to bridge the gap between their limited linguistic resources and the desired level of proficiency to comprehend the text, the present study demonstrated that it is equally important to guide them to process bottom-up information in order to prevent them from relying heavily on extensive guessing work but to acquire part of the TL system which is necessary for advanced communication. As evidenced in this study, bottom-up processes dictogloss tasks using the authentic media input enabled the learners to engage in form, to increase in their parsing and processing ability, and to negotiate meaning through collaborative dialogue and all of those elements resulted in the development of TL syntactic structures.

In addition, although this study could not deal with in-depth if the authentic materials benefited more than the modified ones, at least the result indicated that the use of authentic materials created the natural linguistic environment for the participants to have an authentic experience to practice recognizing the word boundaries and focusing on form. To assist learners to acquire various language properties, the study, thus, suggests that instructors use the activities which promote accurate recognition and recall of words, syntax, and expressions that occurred in the input. Although such activities have been discouraged for reasons especially when they are used to the students with low listening ability, it does not mean that instructors should uniformly give up on instructing bottom-up processes. Simply put, we cannot throw out a baby with the bath water. Instead, instructors should be fully aware the benefits of bottom-up processes and the use of authentic input in the context where learners’ collaborative dialogue is promoted. In other words, teachers should discern the situations where comprehension only is an appropriate instructional goal from those where comprehension plus acquisition is a relevant focus (Richard, 2005).

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Appendix A. Transcription symbols	<Jefferson, 2004>

(::)		prolongation of the immediately prior sound
(.)		a brief interval (about a tenth of seconds) within or between utterances
(.5)		the time elapsed (by tenths of seconds) between the end of the utterance or sound and the start of the next utterance or sound
=		latched utterances – no break or gap between stretches of talk
?		rising intonation
.		falling intonation
,		unfinished intonational contour

Jaewoo Shim

Professor

Department of English Education, Chonbuk National University

664-1 Deokjin-gu, Jeonju-si, Jeollabuk-do,

Phone: 063-270-2729

Email: shimjw@cbnu.ac.kr

Heechul Lee

Professor, Chair of the department

Department of English Education, Chonbuk National University

664-1 Deokjin-gu, Jeonju-si, Jeollabuk-do,

Phone: 063-270-2719

Email: hclee@cbnu.ac.kr

Maya Hyunjeong Lee

Lecturer

Department of English Education, Chonbuk National University

664-1 Deokjin-gu, Jeonju-si, Jeollabuk-do,

Phone: 063-270-2728

Email: maya.lee2008@gmail.com

Received on February 14, 2018

Revised version received on June 16, 2018

Accepted on June 30, 2018