Running Dictation

One of the activities usually done to teach english as a foreign language is a dictation. The teacher gets a short story or something like that, and dictates it to the class while the students write what they here. I suppose it helps the students with word order, and proper sentence structure. Here, they do dictations and grade the students on them. The teacher looks for common mistakes and goes over them with the class. This shit is so WACK! I did several dictations with my students and its boring as hell. I tried ways to jazz it up tho.

One dictation I did was about a true story of a women who left millions of dollars to her DOG when she died. She had a son and grandchildren, but still left her fortune to her dog. The son sued her estate for the money and I am not sure of the outcome but I used that to my advantage. After the dictation, I told the students we would have a mock court case. The son would take his mother to court (she didnt die yet, but he found out about her plan to give the money to the dog) and a jury had to decide who would win the money. I was the judge (to keep order in the room) and there were 2 lawyers, jurors, the defendant, plantiff, and so on. It was really interesting and the kids and I enjoyed the activity. But not all the dictations could be like this one.

So one of the other teachers told me about something called "Running Dictation" A story is cut into strips and taped to the wall or board. The students work in pairs. One student runs to the wall, reads the strip, runs to the partner and dictates what was on the strip. Memory is of the upmost importance. After all the strips are dictated, they must work as a team to put the story in the correct order. This was a really good activity and the students seemed to like it.

Ive done it twice now, and I think ill stop doing it! lol. While running, the students push and hit eachother. If the story is too long they cant figure out the order in the 40 minutes alotted for class. If its too short they get it quickly, figure out the order then want to play around cuz they get distracted easily. If its too hard they dont understand. Some of them after they have got all the sentences are disinterested in putting them in the correct order and just start walkin around class, playing around, or start talkin.

It was fun while it lasted.....and interesting.