You’ve got phoneme-grapheme mapping, blending, and decodable texts… but are you using dictation? It’s one of the most powerful (and often overlooked) tools in a structured literacy routine.
Dictation doesn’t just help with spelling. It strengthens decoding, phonics knowledge, and writing conventions all in one shot. When used consistently and intentionally, dictation helps solidify the phonics skills you’re working on without needing a lot of extra prep.
What Is Dictation?
With dictation, students take what they hear and translate it into written language, applying their phonics knowledge as they go.
Dictation can include:
- Sound dictation (writing a letter or grapheme for a sound)
- Word dictation (writing a word)
- Sentence dictation (applying phonics, morphological, and syntactical knowledge (like understanding sentence structure) to write complete sentences with the right spelling, spacing, and punctuation.
It gives students a chance to apply what they’ve learned in an integrated way. And unlike isolated spelling lists, dictation focuses on phonics patterns students actually have learned, making it more meaningful and more effective. Plus, it’s a great informal assessment tool!
Dictation Steps
Why Dictation Works
Dictation supports orthographic mapping, builds fluency with high-utility phonics patterns, and promotes automaticity. I especially love sentence dictation. Students might be able to spell a word correctly during isolated practice, but using that same word in a sentence is often a different story. Writing a word on its own is one thing—writing it correctly in context is another. When students write sentences, they have to juggle everything they’ve learned: phonics, spelling, punctuation, and how sentences work. Dictation gives them structured practice with all of it. It bridges the gap between knowing a word and using it correctly in writing, helping students move from isolated skill to fluent application.
And when done consistently, dictation helps students become more confident with the technical side of writing—like spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. The more automatic those skills become, the more mental energy they have to focus on what they want to say when they’re really writing.
What About Morphology?
Dictation isn’t just about sounds and letters. It’s also an opportunity for students to work with meaningful word parts—like base words and suffixes. Even in simple word dictation, you’re reinforcing morphemes like -s, -ed, and -ing. As students get into two-syllable words, they begin to recognize prefixes (re-, un-, dis-) and base words like ject or tract. That’s morphological learning in action—and dictation gives them a chance to apply it.
Learn more about morphology here.
Dictation as an Assessment Tool
One of the things I love most about dictation is how much it reveals about a student’s understanding of words and sentences. Each word they write is a little window into what they’re internalizing—and what they still need help with. And the best part? You don’t need a separate assessment block to figure it out. It’s literally right there!
Dictation lets you spot different types of errors and respond in real time:
- Orthographic errors: A student writes brik instead of brick. You can see they’re relying on sound alone and haven’t learned the ck generalization.
- Phonological errors: A student writes grib instead of grip. They’ve swapped a sound. Or a student write sep instead of step. They’ve omitted a sound. This tells you they may still need support with phoneme segmentation.
- Morphological errors: A student writes jumpt for jumped. They’re writing what they hear, but they haven’t yet internalized that jump is the base word and -ed is the suffix that marks past tense. This tells you they’re applying phonics but not morphology. It’s a great opportunity to pause and say, “What’s the base word here?” and “What suffix do we add to show past tense?”
- Syntactic or conventions-based errors: A student writes a sentence with the correct words but no capitalization or punctuation. This tells you they need more practice to build that habit.
Over time, these small insights add up. And because dictation is short and built into your routine, you’re collecting ongoing data without needing to stop and give a formal assessment.
Learn more about phonics assessment here.
Where Does it Fit in Your Structured Literacy Routine?
The beauty of dictation is that it doesn’t require any additional prep, once you have your word and sentence lists done. Students can use whiteboards or notebooks to write their words and sentences. I usually have it at the end of a session, but it can fit anywhere. And like I said, it’s like practice and informal assessment wrapped up in one!
Read more about a Structured Literacy routine here.
Common Struggles (and How to Work Through Them)
Sentence dictation is powerful, but it’s also challenging. There is a lot that goes into writing a sentence.
Here are some common issues that you may see:
1. Students forget the sentence before they finish writing it. This is so common, especially for early writers. Try having them:
- Repeat the sentence out loud first
- Count the number of words
You can also draw lines for each word as a scaffold: “Jake ___ ___ ___ ___ ___.” - After they write each word, have them read what they’ve written so far and repeat the rest of the sentence.
2. Students omit a word. Sometimes students leave out a word entirely, usually because they just forget it or they’re focused so hard on spelling that they lose track of the sentence. You can use the same tips above, but the most helpful tip is:
- Have them reread their sentence as they write it. Once they’ve taken time to encode a word, reread what was written so far. This is such a good habit to get into! Don’t wait until you’ve written the whole sentence. If you’re always reading what you’ve written and then adding to it, you can avoid missing words.
3. Students struggle with spacing, punctuation, or capitalization.
This is totally normal early on. This is part of why I love dictation, though. When writing content, students have the additional task of thinking about what to write and how they want to write it. With dictation, they are writing what you tell them to write, so they can focus more on the conventions.
4. Students don’t apply their phonics or morphological knowledge.
This is more common than you would think. This usually means they haven’t fully internalized the pattern or skill yet or they don’t yet know how to transfer it into real writing. Here are a few things you can do:
- Reteaching in the moment
- Post visual reminders to refer to (like grapheme cards or spelling rules)
- Ask guiding questions like, “What sound do you hear? What letters have we learned that spell that sound? Which spelling is used at the end of a word?” If they omit or use the wrong suffix, you might lead them by asking, “What’s the base word? What suffix do we use to show past tense?”
Need Resources for Dictation?
If you’re ready to give dictation a bigger role in your instruction, I’ve got you covered. All of these lists include words AND sentences!
My Single-Syllable Word List includes decodable word lists and matching sentences organized by skill—from CVC words to vowel teams, silent letters, and r-controlled vowels.
My Two-Syllable Word List goes a step further, combining syllable division strategies with decodable sentences to match.
My Morphology Lists include a prefix word list and a Latin bases word list, giving students meaningful practice with morphemes they’ll encounter again and again. (Suffix list coming soon!)
📄 And the Student Dictation Pages provide structured, repeatable formats for sound, word, and sentence dictation—with teacher prompts and tips for support and correction.
These lists (bundle here) are everything! I use them so often and can’t imagine not having them! Real talk, I spend years truly building these lists.
I tend to do dictation on whiteboards (for easy erasing) or notebooks (so I can see progress), but if you’d like a page that can be turned in (to keep for assessment), feel free to use this:
Click here for this free printable.
