RUNNING DICTATION

Running
dictation is a type of dictation in which your students are responsible for it
from the start. They
should work in pairs and it goes like this: You should come up with a story
that you will write on a piece of paper and hang it onto the wall in your
classroom. You can use multiple sheets of paper so that your students don’t
collide during the activity. One person from the pair has to "run" to the paper
and read and remember as much as possible and come back to their partner as
fast as possible and dictate what they have read, while that person writes down
the story. In the middle of the “game” you should tell them to swap the roles,
so that it gets more interesting and that they both try out both roles.






Organising a running dictation

• Choose a
  short text at the right level for your group or class.
  

• Photocopy
  several examples of the text depending on the size of your class. Pin the
  examples up on the walls of the room where you are working. The challenge
  for each group is for them to
  reproduce a written form of the text you choose.
  

• Explain that
  each group or pair must choose one person to write down a text.
  

• Depending on
  the size of your groups, explain that the other members of the group will
  leave take turns to go and read the text you have pinned up on the wall.
  It is very important that only one person from each group is reading and
  memorising at any one time.
  

• That person
  memorises as much as s/he can and then returns to the group to dictate
  what they have remembered to the other members of the group. The student
  chosen to do the writing must write down what it is said as accurately as possible.
  When the person reading and running has come to the end of what they have
  remembered, the next person in the group sets off.
  

• Continue like
  this until the group has written down the whole version of the text.
  

• The group
  that finishes first is the winner!
  

Marking
the written text






Method 1



The winning group has 100 points. Second
place - 90 points, third place - 80 points and so on. Groups swap versions and
are given your correct version of the text, which they use to mark another
group’s version. For each error that a group has made, a point is subtracted
from their total, so if one group had won, but made 10 mistakes, they would
have ninety points. The group that has the most points after the running and
the marking is the overall winner.





Method 2






You
can ask each group at a time to come and write a sentence on the board to check
the accuracy of their version. This way of checking is quite interesting as you
get a lot of questions about spelling and grammar. Because people are writing
as a group, they are not being put on the spot individually and are mostly
quite willing to share their version.





Variations

• You can
  dictate a text rather than letting students read. Students run to you and
  you read a sentence of your text out loud – i.e. they listen and remember,
  they don’t read.
  

• You can use
  pictures. Students run, look, then describe what they see.
  

• With more
  advanced classes you can use notes as the text. Ask the students to make
  full sentences from the notes, and then you have all sorts of versions to
  share.
  

One final task






Once the groups have
finished, take their texts away and get them to work together to rewrite the
text from memory to see how much they can remember. This is a very good way of
getting them to stretch their memories a little.