Voice dictation in the secondary school classroom

This paper reports on an exploratory study in which a group of second year secondary school pupils with reading ages ranging from 8.3 to 12.9 performed a set of tasks using the IBM VoiceType dictation package in order to determine the benefits of voice dictation for classroom use. The results showed that pupils with varying reading ages could dictate at comparable speeds and often with similar degrees of accuracy. Homophones were almost never a source of error in the texts produced with voice dictation, as compared with the children’s handwritten texts. The implications of these findings for the use of dictation software in the classroom and for further studies of the potential of voice dictation for improving children’s spelling and composition skills are discussed.