Dictogloss in the works

It's been a white since I mentioned dictogloss. Yesterday I did the research class for the dictogloss collaborative chapter for the TESOL Classroom series.

The group are 2 Jr high school boys and 2 Jr High School girls, all 2nd year students.

My aspect of the dictogloss for this chapter is the V-task approach, or collaborative learning in the classroom and creating student autonomy.

Although the passage I used for the class was long, and the approach I took was different from my colleagues, I was really impressed with the results.

My focus in my conversation class is on the use of interlanguage and using the language outside of the 'set phrases' taught in the textbook. The students responded really well to the conversation, often the discussion becoming very heated at times, one student having heard 'Well', another student having heard 'Wow', yet in context 'wow' just didn't fit. The discussion about the language becomes the most prevalent. The final conversation had 'good' mistakes, and there were some not so good mistakes, but the whole approach to the learning was a great experience for the students.

We've only got a month to get this chapter done!

Dictogloss

Here is a group of students doing a dictogloss exercise. We did a song from the SuperKids 3 book, the 'Did you play baseball yesterday?' song.

The students responded much better than I thought they would and I tried to do as much scaffolding as I could; for example getting them to spell a word as much as they could before I helped them the rest of the way, rather than me just spelling the word for them when they asked. Of I redirected the question back to the group to see if anyone else could help spell the word. This was the first dictogloss that I did with them and I did end up playing the song about 6 times. (I also played the last part of the song once as you'll see in this video).

Overall the dictogloss was a surprise success, the students had a slow start, but to be expected having never done this before, but the students ended up doing a lot of communicating amongst themselves to get the words all down. In the end, I let them check their version against the version in the book. They were almost all perfect.

As you will see in the video too, the Did you....? version was OK, but when it came to the simple past sentence, they couldn't catch the -ed on the end of play, or paint.
This was only their second week on this chapter - simple past with regular verbs adding -ed only, so I will try something different next time to see how much they were able to notice.