I was quizzed on a Facebook comment I made by a professional musician friend about the way many teachers ‘do melodic dictation’ at school.

My comment was along the lines of “If we taught calculus in the way many teach melodic dictation, very few people would ever grasp these skills!”
When Maths, English or other subjects impart knowledge they TEACH the skills first before assessing students’ knowledge. Melodic dictation is a form of assessment. It is an activity designed to ascertain whether students can write down what they hear. In calculus, the equivalent is a test that assesses knowledge that has been taught over a period of time. I have lost count of the number of students I meet at the VCE, and other levels, who have never been taught the skills involved before they are tested through melodic dictation.

The general picture of the situation relayed to me, which rings true of my own experience at high school, is something like this:

Teacher: “Oh, there’s an aural section in your exam in a few weeks. We
should probably do something on that!”

Teacher presents class with a melody for students to dictate. Upon
completion…

Teacher: “How did you go? Not good? OK, let’s do another one.”

The problem with this approach is the student who doesn’t ‘get it’ is taught, unintentionally, that there are haves and have-nots in music; there are those who are blessed with the ability to comprehend and transcribe what they write and those who aren’t and never will be. One of my students told me that before she was taught how to do dictations at university level, she used to draw fish on her exam paper. She got less stressed this way and the same mark she would have gotten had she attempted
a question which she did not comprehend. I see countless VCE students approach the VCE melodic dictation the following way:

First hearing: listen to the first interval, try and hold it in your head
while the rest of the melody is playing. Try and count it out and transcribe this.

Second hearing: Listen to the second interval, hold it in your head, count it out and
transcribe that one.

Third hearing: You get the gist!

The result? After five hearings, they have five notes, but guess what? They’re all wrong because the first interval was incorrect and the other intervals were worked out relating to this point of reference. This approach reveals a lack of concept of tonal center, what is expected above or below certain notes, expected patterns, or any idea of the harmonic context. It breaks my heart to see this over and over again.

So what do we do? How do we teach these skills rather than just test them and hope that, through repetition, students will miraculously “get it” one day? – this was the question posed to me by a professional musician, who had obviously not been taught the ‘how’ either.

The Kodály approach sees dictation as a practice of skills learned. They can be thought of in terms of the lesson ‘Focus’ format, which consists of Review, Point and Reinforce.

Review

Prepare your students for a dictation. Get them to sight read some music or sing a known song that uses the same tone set as the dictation, do some echo singing of phrases, sing from a tone ladder focusing on any intervals that may be more difficult.

Echo singing can be particularly helpful.

1. Sing or play a short phrase for each student to ‘clever echo’
2. Students sing back to ‘loo’ showing the contour by pointing in the air
3. An individual sings the phrase in solfa with handsigns
4. The whole class echos with handsigns.
5. Repeat with a different student. Or, if this is too much too soon, try with the whole class or a group giving the answer.

It is not ‘cheating’ to practice a tone set or intervals before a dictation. In order to aurally comprehend a melody and pick out patterns these skills need to be practiced before they are tested just as in any other subject. Aural skills that are improved in other activities – games, sight reading, agility exercises etc. are also building up these skills in recognition and helping build a bank of melodic patterns that will be recognised more easily over time.

Point

Once students are prepared, give the dictation. Let students listen once without writing and ask questions: What note did we start on/finish on? What were the highest/lowest notes? Is there any repetition? Where?

Give sign posts along the way: Ask the class to sing the final interval in solfa.
Ask students to show the handsigns for a repeated phrase or of the highest/lowest notes when they occur. Encourage students to use handsigns to check their answers. Once students get used to this, it is amazing how many mistakes they will discover by showing the handsigns and inner hearing the melody.  I allow my students to use handsigns in their exams.  They make no noise and can be done without other students seeing, depending on the exam set up.

Scaffold your dictation to include extension. Ask any students who have finished to notate it from stick notation and solfa onto the stave, or transpose it, memorise it, be prepared to play it on the piano from memory, in the original or in a different key, sing and handsign, sing to letter names either in the original key or transposed. These activities (in the original key) have the added benefit of giving more hearings for those in the class who are weaker and need more.

Once the dictation has been heard a number of times, and the answer derived, get the class to sing the melody in solfa with handsigns, to letter names using the finger staff, inner hear particular notes, listen to students who have done extension work while the rest of the class handsign their task, and get the whole class to sing the melody from memory.Scaffolding and increasing difficulty can also occur in the melodic dictation itself.

 

Whole melodies need not be dictated. Start off with a missing bar or bars, give certain notes, even prepare the dictation for weaker students by giving them particular intervals or bars to help keep them on the right track.

Melodic dictation is an intricate skill to learn. Often it is not given enough time in the classroom and students are often not taught the process of getting a dictation right
in a way that lets them believe it is a skill they CAN grasp with work. Working with University students or music teachers can quickly show the negative effect on their confidence of years of not being taught this skill in a detailed, sequential and meaningful way. Using the Review, Point, and Reinforce steps can give students the success they long for and prepare them for a musically literate life up to VCE and beyond.