Running Dictation

A favorite lesson for students is always the running dictation game.

In this class, there are 4 students, all aged 10, and they are studying from the SuperKids 3 textbook. Since I don't like to follow the PPP method, I use the text mostly as a guide for the students to get a jist of what we are doing in the class. We still do a bit of the pairwork but mostly it is learning on their own and if they have questions, please ask me sort of lesson.

This lesson was all about learning some of the skills, the students did them all, reading, writing, listening and speaking. But they also learn other skills such as understanding, expressing, indicating, recognizing, learning the elements of sentence structure and using punctuation. (see White, R.V. (1988) The ELT Curriculum. Blackwell Publishing. Malden, MA. pp. 70-71)

Not only did they have to find out spelling, but they also had to find out where the beginning of the sentence was, capital letters, the comma, period, question mark and even the apostrophe.

They learned that the beginning of a sentence always starts with a capital, it ends with a period and 'it is' is abbreviated to 'it apostrophe s'.

The way the lesson goes;

Students are in pairs. One student writes, the other runs. In this case, the paragraph the runner had to dictate to their partner was in another room. They run to the other room, memorize as much as they could, then come back and tell the writer - who then writes it down in their notebook. 'How do you spell...?' 'Once more please.' are popular phrases they use to be able to correctly write down everything they are told to write.

When the paragraph is finished, then the students switch and a new paragraph is started. I don't use the same paragraph for all the students, it's too easy for them to copy from each other. The point is that they listen and write. And if they don't understand, then they have to ask to get the correct spelling and punctuation.

It keeps them busy and occupied and it's great exercise for the students too! I only do this lesson once every few months with a class.

It's great for all ages. I even do it with the little ones, but with words only, like cat or dog. They get so frustrated after only remembering the 'c' or the 'a' and having to run back to remember the word again, but they remember their letters and they have so much fun! And they get to practise their writing too!

Mark