It is of great interest for English teachers to clarify how their intervention into their students' thoughts and behaviors promotes learning processes for intended outcomes. Compared with senior high-school students,university students, except those majoring in English, have fewer English classes in general. On average, they take English classes once or twice a week when they are freshmen and sophomores. It means that English teachers at the university level are facing a challenging task of how to motivate their students and encourage them to study outside classes of their own accord.
According to Gass (1988), there are five stages whereby second language (L2) learners convert input into output: apperceived input, comprehended input, intake, integration and output. Gass assumes that any linguistic form is not acquired at once. Learners gradually deepen their understanding on a certain linguistic form and will be able to use it on their own. This is what teachers have to take into consideration in planning and structuring a lesson.
For a lesson to be effective, it needs to be structured in a way where learners progressively enrich their understanding on linguistic forms. That is, an effective lesson should have the following four stages: presentation,comprehension, practice and production (henceforth, PCPP). A lesson organized in the PCPP sequence is considered to act positively on learners’ cognitive processes (Muranoi, 2006).
Different output activities have a different impact on L2 learning. According to Farley (2004), a meaningbased output activity is more likely to contribute to L2 learning than a mechanical drill. Dictogloss (see 2.2 for the details) is a meaning-based output activity which requires learners to reconstruct a text they listen to. This study tries to investigate whether dictogloss contributes to the improvement of university English learners’listening skills and whether the technique increases their motivation to learn English.