integrated skills work - dictogloss

allan birimac

Today’s lesson (based on a dictogloss - for an account of dictogloss see below) went well, the main reason being that the three students present (Shazida was absent) were in control as a group for most of the lesson and cognitively involved in reconstructing the target text. This text was: "Billy is really looking forward to his school holidays. He is flying to Wagga Wagga to visit his cousins, Tom and Sally, who live on a farm. They are going to meet him at the airport and for two weeks they are going to do some of their favourites things, like fishing, horse-riding, and camping. Billy comes back to Sydney on the last day of the holidays – I’m sure he will sleep well that night!" What they wrote collectively was: "Billy is really looking for to school holiday. He is flying to Wagga Wagga visit to his cousins. They are going to meeting him and for two weeks they are going to do some of the fever things like fishing horse rittings. Billy come back to Sydney on the last of the holiday. I’m show he was sleep tonight." Before reading out the text I pre-taught the vocabulary - Wagga Wagga, cousin, horse-riding, camping. While reading, I noticed that the students were fairly slow in writing down what they heard, preferring to proceed word by word rather than any word they happened to remember. Luma almost gave up after the second sentence!. As a result, I repeated some phrases, but took care to keep the pace going as accuracy in note-taking was not the purpose of the exercise although it seemed important to the girls. Upon finishing the reading, Kohinor and Marjia seemed flustered at the lack of completeness of their notes, but I reassured them by saying that an exact transcription was not necessary, and they only needed to try and repeat the message using correct grammar. The next 15 minutes saw them thoroughly engaged as a group in pooling their notes and reconstructing the text, often discussing choices of spelling, word order, and content. I backed away to a corner of the classroom and did not need to make a contribution as they students engaged with the task. Upon completion, I invited the girls in turn to write sentences from their text on the blackboard. Again I noticed that their writing (letter formation, speed) was quite slow. Occasionally one of the seated girls would suggest a change to the scribe at the blackboard. When finished, I went through the text with them and indicated where errors in grammar or spelling were present and elicited alternatives from the students. For example, I indicated an incomplete word by adding a line where letters were missing (e.g. "for____"), or inserting a symbol to indicate a missing word or letter ("to ^ school holidayO"). In most cases the girls were able to self-correct, such as when using the base verb form after "going to". Interestingly, although I had written "horse-riding" and "camping" on the blackboard in pre-teaching vocabulary as well as miming or drawing pictures to establish their meanings, the students were not able to reproduce these words in their correct forms even during text correction. Also, the girls had trouble with possessive personal pronouns ("his" & "their"), Finally, I gave the girls a copy of the original text, which they read eagerly, even aloud in Kohinor’s case. I asked they girls if they had enjoyed this activity, and they seemed sincere in answering positively. I asked them for homework to underline the verbs in the passage that talk about a future activity (there were five: going to + vb, present continuous, present simple, and future simple) which I intend to do more work on in their next lesson. Perhaps most pleasing of all was that an informal conversation followed based around Marjia & Kohinor’s plans to travel back to Bangladesh in two years. We talked about differences in their home countries and Sydney (Luma liked Turkey very much) and about where they speak English and who with (not much outside the classroom unfortunately). What pleased me most was that this discussion most closely resembled unforced conversation, marked by even participation, interjections, and building on previous contributions from a speaker. I’d recommend using the dictogloss activity to anyone working with a small group (or even with a large class for that matter). In the many times I’ve used it there has rarely been an occurrence that students hadn’t taken charge during the reconstruction stage, which involves deep processing of language input and activation of already known language. As well, it’s nice to have the students working in collaboration and independently of the teacher. I first came across 'Dictogloss' in a textbook titled "Grammar Dictation" by a Sydney teacher trainer called Ruth Wajnryb (you might find it in the Curriculum library in the Old Teachers College building). What you do is: 1) script a short coherent text on a topic (e.g. the graded reader the students are reading?). Your text should be short (3-4 sentences) and not too difficult both in terms of grammar and vocabulary. 2) In the lesson introduce the main topic, and elicit students' comments, words, etc. about that topic. If necessary, introduce and check meaning of any key words that your text might contain. 3) Ask the students if they know what dictaion is, & that this is similiar to a dictation but not quite the same thing. Tell them you're going to read the text twice at slightly slower than normal reading aloud speed. Tell them how many sentences the text contains. The first time the students listen, the second they take notes. They'll probably need a third reading. 4) Put the students together, & their task is to reassemble, rewrite, rephrase their notes so that their single common text is as similar in meaning to the original text you read out. For them to do this will require both of them to give input from their notes (often it's better to have 3-5 students working on this, but it should be OK with just two). 5) When they've finished, you can give them feedback on the text in any manner that is accessible to them (e.g. "In sentence 1, there is one misspelt word and one incorrect verb tense. Can you fix it?") 6) Corrections attempted, give them a copy of the original to compare with their own. Probably the set-up & instructions are the most difficult thing with this activity, but its beauty is its utility at all learner levels, learners actively seek cooperation because they feel it aids their own performance (sort of like sanctioned cheating), and it involves listening, speaking, and writing. Underneath it all is the malevolent presence of the teacher who has cleverly used some target structures (i.e. grammar) in the text in order to expose the students to it as a preview to more work on this part of grammar, or to surreptitiously have the students practise a grammar point or two when all they thought they were doing was a funny type of dictation. Also, to compare the students' text with the teacher's can be revealing in itself, and can often help to identify language items that may need further work later on.

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