Currently available in German only!

Practising dictations - take the classroom home

Dyslexic children suffer from a big problem when writing dictations at school: They hardly ever reach a good mark. But what is the reason? In most cases dyslexics are better prepared for dictations than there schoolfellows are due to intense training at home. So why do most of them still fail their writing tests making a lot of mistakes they did not make at home? The reason for the difference in the number of mistakes made in a dictation at home and at school is the entirely different situation in which it is written. At home the room is quiet and the person dictating normally sits next to the child and adapts his/her speed of speaking and the repetition of the sentences to the child’s speed of writing. Moreover the voice of the dictating person does not change its direction or distance. At school the teacher walks around in the classroom and therefore changes the direction of speaking very often and will not wait until everybody has finished writing the sentence but continues with the dictation.

Thus particularly for dyslexic children it is important to practise the dictation in an environment that is similar to the one in the classroom. So take the classroom home:

Playfully preparing dictations

To get a good preparation for dictations at school the CD-ROM "Playfully Preparing Dictations" was developed. It contains 57 dictations for the second, third and fourth school year.

Before you start a dictation you can set special "classroom situations" within the user dialog: several options enable you to set the volume of the typical background noise, the volume of the dictating voice as well as the number of repetitions and the length of pauses between spoken phrases or sentences.

The practising child puts on headphones and as soon as the dictation starts it will be transferred into the acoustic situation of a real classroom. The teacher reads out the complete dictation first and continues with the dictation of the single parts, one after another. The child listens and writes down what it hears. Throughout the whole exercise there will be the typical sort of background noise you can constantly hear in a classroom. After finishing the dictation the whole text will be read again giving the child the opportunity to revise his work and/or to fill in blanks.

The teacher’s voice as well as the background noises were recorded with a special technology producing an almost real impression of a classroom. It is clearly perceptible that the teacher is walking around in the classroom during the dictation since her voice will be heard from different directions and distances.

System Requirements:

• Pentium-CPU 133 MHz or faster
• CD-ROM Drive
• Windows 9.X/NT/ME/2000/XP
• Min. 30 MB of hard disk space
• 16 MB RAM
• SoundBlaster 16bit compatible soundcard
• S-VGA compatible VGA graphics card

(to the PowerPoint presentation of this product...)