Dictation: the new (really?) kid on the block. 9 activities.

Happy new year everyone! As the new term has started and inspired by Suzi Bewell, I thought I would write a small post about my favourite Dictation activities. Dictation has become fashionable lately, as it was revealed that it would be part of the new GCSE exam tasks. However, I know that many teachers have been using Dictation tasks for years, as part of the modelling stage of teaching a topic; as a listening activity led by the teacher, and later, by the pupils themselves. 

Dictation is a fantastic activity to include in your repertoire of listening activities as it practises the bottom-up processing skills involved in listening: phonemic, syllabic, segmenting, lexical and syntactic processing skills, as outlined in the book Breaking the Sound Barrier, which I thorough recommend, by Gianfranco Conti and Steve Smith. 

Dictations tend to be carried out by us, the teachers, which means that we can adapt the speed of the utterances, the intonation or can focus on segmenting activities, which students find particularly difficult, as liaison/sinalefa phenomena are part of the spoken discourse. It allows teachers to focus on a particular grammatical structure or specific sounds and how these correspond to given graphemes. 

I personally do not agree that dictation should be an assessment element of the GCSE exam, as pure grammar activities are not (these are assessed implicitly via writing/speaking skills). I see dictation as a first scaffolded, learning step into the learning journey, allowing modelling the language to students, and an activity which should be present in all MFL classrooms at all Levels!

These are my 9 favourite, high impact Dictation activities which students particularly enjoy in my lessons. To carry out these dictations, I use mainly Mini Whiteboards:

Classic dictation

This involves the dictation of small sentences/paragraphs after language has been introduced to students via chorus repetition. I start slowly, making clear pauses between words, to quickly increase speed and start joining words via liaison. Students just write in the TL what they hear and show me after I count 1,2,3. As I can check for understanding immediately, I can adapt my dictations to the students' responses.

Mistaken dictation

This is a classical dictation activity but with deliberate grammatical mistakes (it could also be pronunciation mistakes or any type of error!) which the students must spot. This is a great activity, again, to test whether students have assimilated a particular grammatical rule.

Delayed dictation

This type of dictation, originally from Gianfranco Conti, is great for students with poor working memory processing. The idea is to dictate an utterance, like in the classic dictation, but students are not allowed to write the heard material until after 7-10 seconds. During these seconds, students need to try to memorise the heard utterance by mentally repeating to themselves in their heads. Students keep their hands in their heads while they do this and when I say "now", they write the sentence. 

Random dictation

This involves dictating random sentences that if put in order will make up a paragraph. After dictating the sentences, students, in pairs, rearrange the sentences in order to form the original paragraph. I love this activity because it can lead to translating the paragraph, improving it or just using as a model to create a new one.

Running dictation

A classic that works every time! Students work in pairs. Several texts are displayed around the room, one for each pair. One student, the scriber, remains sitting while their partner runs to one of the texts, memorises a sentence, runs back to their partner and dictates the memorised sentence, which the scriber writes down. The fastest couple to rewrite the text on the wall, is the winner! After they dictate the text, students can then translate it into English, improve it, use it as a model etc..

Opinion dictation

Students draw three columns in their MWB: Yes/No/I don't mind. The teacher says sentences and students write them in the correspondent column depending if they like what the statement says or they agree with it, or if they don't or they don't mind. I love this activity as it adds an element of personal choice. Similarly, the activity leads nicely to an oral task, where students talk about what they like/dislike/agree or disagree according to their choices. This activity also leads to reported speech sentences: "my friend says that he/she likes...."

Dictogloss

Dictogloss is a dictation activity where learners are required to reconstruct a short text by listening and noting down key words, which are then used as a base for reconstruction. I love this activity because it is a multiple skills and systems activity. Learners practise listening, writing and speaking (by working in groups) and use vocabulary, grammar and discourse systems in order to complete the task.

I sometimes carry out the activity doing the dictation myself but my favourite mode is when students work in small groups or pairs as follows:

1. One student reads a text prepared by me based on the Sentence Builders we are working on and will take notes in English (not literal translation)

2. Working in pairs, student one, using their English notes, will reconstruct/dictate the text in Spanish to student two. Student two will  write in Spanish the text they hear. As a final task, both students will look at the original text and compare both versions.  

I do use this at all levels by adapting a given text. An example on the topic of Jobs is below for a Y11 class. I tend to prepare two texts so all students have the chance to be speakers! Students then exchange information, this way Dictogloss becomes an information gap activity.

Information Gap dictation

This dictation is to be done by the students in pairs. Students have two texts/ list of sentences with missing bits in them but by listening to their partner, they can fill in the gaps in their respective texts.

Sentence 1 for Student A:

Suelo _______ con mis _________ los _______ de ______ porque ____ ayuda a ______

Sentence 1 for Student B:

_____ salir ___ _____ amigos ____ fines ___ semana ____ me ____ ___ relajarme

Buzzed dictation

You will need a buzzer for this activity.  The teacher dictates sentences or a paragraph to the students, which they write in MWBs, every so often the teacher presses the buzzer and the students need to write a word that makes sense in the given context, to replace the buzz. At the end of the activity, we look at the different options that students have written.