“Hi Ross and Phil. We recently had a school improvement advisor suggest that we only use dictation in the FS and Year One for our writing lessons. We’re sure this isn’t the right way to go…”
Dictation can help teachers check children’s practised spelling. What the studies don’t show is that it improves children’s handwriting, fluency, punctuation or the quality of their writing. It perhaps belongs in spelling lessons but not writing lessons.
You read a sentence aloud. Your class writes it down. You check their spellings, handwriting, capital letters and full stops. It’s certainly easy to run. In some schools, it has become a writing lesson in itself, with children taking down the teacher’s sentences instead of composing their own.
Dictation can be used for three quite different things: to assess spelling, to practise spelling and to teach writing. The evidence supports the first, only partly supports the second and doesn’t support the third.
Two things that are often conflated
When people say dictation ‘works’, they can mean two quite different things:
- Getting better at dictation. By practising dictation, children get better at dictation activities. Children make fewer errors when you dictate sentences to them.
- Using the skills in their own writing. Children spell, form letters or punctuate more fluently and accurately in their own future writing.
The second is the one that matters in a writing lesson. Most of the evidence offered for dictation is about the first.
None of this makes the first kind of evidence trivial. Dictation is a standard way of testing spelling knowledge, and a child who can now spell a word when it is read aloud has genuinely learned something. The questions are: what produced that learning, and does it transfer when children choose and spell words in their own writing? Measuring that is certainly harder, because, if taught badly, children can avoid words they can’t spell conventionally [LINK, for more on this].
Where the claim comes from
The case for dictation rests on a sound idea. When a child has to think hard about how to spell a word or form a letter, they have less attention left for what they want to say. Make spelling and handwriting automatic and children can concentrate on their ideas more.
Dictation is offered as a way to get there: it lets children practise spelling, handwriting and punctuation without the demand of well… actually writing.
If dictation is offered as one way to practise spelling in spelling lessons, evidence that children spell the practised words better is a fair test. If it is offered as a way to improve children’s writing, or as a routine for writing lessons, the evidence needs to come from children’s writing.
The one recent comparison study
We found one recent classroom study of teacher sentence dictation with a comparison group: Robinson-Kooi and Hammond (2020). Year 2 pupils in one Australian school were taught spelling patterns, capital letters and full stops explicitly, then practised them through daily sentence dictation. They outperformed pupils at another school who carried on with their usual spelling programme. However, the study is worth looking at closely:
- A very small sample. Two schools: 35 children in two intervention classes against 25 in one comparison class.
- One class may have ‘carried’ the result. The paper reports that it was only one of the intervention classes that consistently outperformed every other class. One strong teacher could explain much of the difference.
- Dictation was never isolated. Unfortunately, children also received explicit teaching of phonics, morphology and proof-reading. With this in mind, we don’t know if it was dictation that brought about the improvements. It could well have been the other things.
- Dictation was also the test. Dictation is a reasonable way to test spelling, but children who practise dictated sentences daily and are then tested on dictated sentences have an advantage over a comparison group that never practised the format of the test.
- Children’s own writing wasn’t measured. It is a spelling and punctuation study.
Does dictation improve spelling?
This is where dictation has its best case, but even here it is under quite narrow conditions.
The oldest comparison found no benefit. In 1954, a French school inspector compared 23 classes of 10-11 year-olds who did dictation for a year with 23 classes who did other work instead. Their spelling progressed equally. He concluded that dictation had no influence on progress in spelling. A national commission in the 1960s reached a similar view: dictation could not be treated as a genuine means of learning spelling (Cogis, Fisher & Nadeau, 2015).
The classic format isn’t the best one. A French study compared ordinary dictation with guided dictation, where children got given strategies and clues and discussed the sentences together afterwards. Guided dictation worked better for average and weaker spellers. Strong spellers made no progress with either (Le Brun et al., 2016).
Spelling learnt through dictation is rarely checked in children’s own writing. Of the teaching studies we found that used dictation, only three looked at how children’s spelling translated to writing their own texts.
- Identical dictation, different results. In a US trial, around one hundred 8-9-year-olds who were struggling to write were taught in pairs by a tutor over 24 short sessions. Two groups did the same spelling practice, including six minutes a session of writing words from dictation, with the correct spelling shown straight away and missed words retaught. Both groups got better at spelling the taught words. But only one group spelled more words correctly in their own essays afterwards: the one that also played word-sorting games exploring the different ways the same sound can be spelled. The group that did the same dictation alongside composition teaching showed no change in the spelling of their essays. The authors attribute the transfer to the explicit teaching of these alternative spellings (Berninger et al., 2002). Dictation wasn’t isolated, though: no group was taught spelling without it, and the group that improved also had more spelling time. So the study shows that dictation with feedback wasn’t enough on its own to improve children’s spelling in their own future writing.
- Better on the test. In a Portuguese trial, seven-year-olds were taught spelling patterns, and the programme ended with three review lessons in which children wrote dictated words and explained their spellings. They got better at spelling the trained words in the dictated test that followed. However, the spellings in their stories did not improve (Alves et al., 2016).
- A dictation score doesn’t tell you how a child spells in their own writing. Italian researchers gave 81 six-year-olds a dictated text and asked them to write their own story. How a child did on one did not predict how they did on the other. The authors concluded that the two tasks draw on different spelling processes (Bigozzi et al., 2016).
Spelling teaching can reach children’s writing. In contrast to dictation, a review of 53 studies found that formal spelling instruction improved spelling in children’s own writing, not just on tests (Graham & Santangelo, 2014).
Does dictation improve handwriting?
We found no study testing whether dictation improves children’s handwriting. The handwriting research points somewhere else: spend your time explicitly teaching children how letters are formed.
- Explicit handwriting teaching works. Across studies from Reception to secondary, teaching handwriting improves legibility and fluency compared with no handwriting teaching (Santangelo & Graham, 2016; (López-Escribano et al., 2022). The teaching in these studies centred on modelling letter formation and supervised practice. Neither review identifies dictation as a practice.
- There is also a practical problem. During dictation, children write at the speed of your sentence, and you can’t watch 30 children’s letter formation as it happens. A child who forms letters incorrectly practises the incorrect movement, at speed. This goes against what the handwriting studies say works: specific attention to letter formation.
Does dictation build fluency that helps children write?
Some claim that dictation makes spelling and handwriting faster and more automatic, and that fluency then frees children to concentrate on composing when they eventually do get to write for themselves.
- Does dictation build fluency? We found no study that measured handwriting speed or spelling fluency after a dictation programme. The handwriting reviews described above focus on letter formation, timed practice and feedback. Neither list dictation as an approach.
- Dictation is poorly designed for fluency. Fluency practice works by pushing children to write a little faster than is comfortable. In dictation, you set the pace, usually slowly and word by word, so no one is left behind.
- Does fluency improve children’s writing? Here there is good evidence. Fluent handwriting and spelling tend to go hand in hand with better writing. Explicit handwriting lessons can influence the quality of children’s writing as fluent hand writers are better able to focus on their ideas and write at length (Santangelo & Graham, 2016; Alves et al., 2016). The studies included no dictation, and the authors suggest that regular opportunities to compose may help explain the largest effects. Keeping this point in mind, other trials have improved children’s transcription without improving their writing. In the first-grade trial described earlier, handwriting got faster and more legible, but children’s writing didn’t get longer or better (Graham et al., 2018). In a Swiss trial, two hundred 8-9-year-olds did 20 short handwriting and spelling sessions; there were almost no lasting gains in fluency and no effect on the quality of their writing (Hurschler Lichtsteiner et al., 2018). And the two large reviews discussed below found that teaching transcription on its own had no significant effect on writing quality.
Activities designed to build fluency don’t reliably make children better writers. Where transcription has helped composition, it has usually been taught directly, and often alongside composition itself.
Dictation has made no contribution to improvements in writing fluency.
Does dictation improve punctuation?
The evidence here is even thinner.
Robinson-Kooi and Hammond’s Year 2 study taught capital letters and full stops and then checked them through dictation tests. Children got better at punctuating dictated sentences in the tests. However, we’ve found no study showing dictation improves punctuation in children’s own writing.
Does dictation improve children’s own writing?
We found no study that measured this. The wider research on spelling, handwriting, fluency and punctuation teaching gives us little reason to expect it.
- For 5-9-year-olds, spelling and handwriting teaching alone doesn’t improve children’s writing. A review of 24 studies found that teaching transcription on its own has no significant effect on any measure of their writing. In fact, its effect on writing quality was slightly negative. It doesn’t even reliably increase how much children write. In contrast, teaching children writing strategies alongside ways to manage their own writing has a large effect on writing quality (Kim et al., 2021).
- Transcription-only teaching is the weakest route to better writing. A 2026 review pooled 70 studies of writing interventions from Reception to secondary. Teaching transcription alone (spelling, handwriting or keyboarding) had no statistically significant effect on either the quality of children’s writing or how much they wrote. Practices which also teach composition have much better effects on writing quality. Practices that teach composition without a transcription component have the largest effect on the quality of children’s writing (Guo et al., 2026). The authors suggest transcription teaching on its own is too detached from the act of writing to carry over into composition.
- When transcription is taught with composition, the picture changes. Among the studies that did include transcription, Guo and colleagues found the largest effects where transcription and composition were both taught explicitly, with time given to each. When struggling 8-9-year-olds were taught spelling and composition together, it was the only approach that improved both their spelling and the quality of their persuasive essays. And when 6-7-year-olds were taught spelling and handwriting alongside planning strategies and the writing process, they wrote better information texts, planned more effectively, and spelt better than their peers (Harris et al., 2023). The lesson isn’t that transcription doesn’t matter. It’s that it matters most when it is taught in the service of children pursuing their own writing, which is precisely what dictation doesn’t provide.
And motivation? We found no study that measured how dictation affects children’s motivation to write, their confidence or their enjoyment. Whether a daily routine of reproducing someone else’s sentence and having errors marked helps or harms children’s sense of themselves as writers is a question that has yet to be answered.
Writing time is precious. Teaching children writing strategies, how texts are structured and simply giving them more time to write all improve the quality of primary children’s writing (Graham et al., 2012). Ten minutes of dictation in a writing lesson is ten minutes not spent utilising evidence-informed practices that have a track record of success (LINK for more details on this).
What is dictation good for?
The evidence points to two legitimate uses.
As an assessment tool for spelling. Dictation is a standard way of testing spelling. A dictated word or sentence lets you check exactly the patterns you have taught, which can sometimes be hard (or time consuming) to find in children’s own writing. But writing and dictation draw on different spelling processes, so use both: dictated words for the patterns you have taught, and children’s own writing for how they spell when it counts most.
As spelling practice. Writing words from memory with immediate correction can help children learn those spellings (Jones et al., 2016; Memory, 2023). However, the gains are mostly specific to the words practised; wider improvement seems to depend on explicit teaching of spelling patterns (Berninger et al., 2002). So choose the words carefully, such as high-frequency words children use in their writing or words that show a pattern you have taught, and check whether they turn up spelt correctly in children’s own writing.
Not as a writing lesson or a writing pedagogy!
What the evidence does not support is dictation as a writing pedagogy, where children transcribe the teacher’s sentences instead of composing their own. No study we found shows that this improves children’s writing, and it takes time away from evidence-informed practices that do [LINK and LINK for more details on this].
In summary
Dictation is a spelling tool at best. It can help teachers check children’s spelling and help children learn the words they practise. Beyond that, the evidence runs out.
- Spelling: dictation is a fair way to practise and check spelling, and writing words from memory with immediate correction helps. But dictation has never been isolated from the other spelling teaching around it, the one comparison of traditional dictation with other spelling work found no benefit, and whether it reaches children’s own writing is rarely measured.
- Handwriting: no study has tested it. However, we know handwriting improves through explicit teaching of letter formation with close supervision.
- Fluency: no study has shown that dictation makes spelling or handwriting faster, and faster transcription on its own doesn’t reliably improve children’s writing anyway.
- Punctuation: Nothing shows that punctuating dictated sentences carries over to children’s own writing.
The question isn’t whether children should ever write down a sentence read aloud. It’s whether success at reproducing someone else’s sentence should be mistaken for learning how to write. It shouldn’t.
On the evidence, dictation has a place in spelling lessons, as one way to check and practise spelling among several.
Dictation has no evidence-backed place as a writing pedagogy.