New ideas for dictations

Dictation has been used in language teaching and testing for a long time. Although it has been questioned recently as being not communicative enough, it still has a number of benefits. Dictations develop learners’ awareness of sound-spelling relationship in English and features of connected speech. They are used as a powerful diagnostic tool and can test various skills at once. We use dictations to provide students with models of target language or to revise the language previously taught. 

As the ELT world has moved away from traditional dictation procedure, now there are tons of dictation types that can be successfully used with all ages and levels. A lot of teachers nowadays are familiar with picture dictations, running dictations and dictogloss. In today’s article let’s take a look at less known but yet effective ways of using dictations in class.

Half the story or Skeleton dictation

In this kind of dictation, the teacher reads the story to the students and they write what they hear. Sounds obvious, right?  However, when the teacher dictates a question, learners should come up with their own ideas to answer it and write them down. When the dictation is over, the class will have several stories with basic things in common, but also a lot of differences. As a possible extension, you could ask them to vote for the best, the funniest or the most surprising story at the end of the task. This activity can be run to practise certain vocabulary sets, e.g. appearance or clothes, or just to give students more of listening and spelling practice. 

Last Saturday I went to a pet shop to buy some food for my dog. In front of me, there was a woman.

What did she look like? (students’ own ideas)

The shop was very busy and we had to wait for a long time. I started talking to the woman.

What did she tell me? (students’ own ideas)

Questions for discussion

Instead of printing out questions for a lead-in or a discussion activity why don’t you dictate them? This way students will practise spelling some bits of the target language or even have more exposure to the grammar. For example, if you are studying second conditional, you could dictate the following questions and then get students to discuss them.

What would you do if you met an alien in your kitchen?

If you were an animal, what animal would you be?

If you could travel to any country in the world, where would you go?

Dictation transformation 

This type of dictation is most often used for grammar practice. However, you can exploit it when you focus on formal/informal register or study synonyms and antonyms. Prepare a set of sentences for dictation. Ask students to write them down, transforming in some way: present to past, an adjective to its extreme synonym, formal to informal. You can make it more student-centred by asking them to work in pairs and dictate the sentences to each other or practise peer correction afterwards.  

This city is old. (This city is ancient.)

My brother makes great coffee. (My brother made great coffee.)

Write back asap! (Looking forward to hearing from you)

Keywords dictation

This one is a great way of not just checking the previously learned vocabulary, but also practise using that. Prepare a set of 10-12 words or collocations that you want your students to practise. Dictate them to the learners either in English or in their L1 if you’d like to check the translation component. After that, ask the students to write a story using all this vocabulary. They can work individually or in pairs. If you opt for pairwork, you can ask them to check the spelling before they start discussing the plot and writing. 

Also, you can find an interesting short story and pick the keywords from there. Dictate the words to the students without telling the original story. After they’ve written their own story based on these words, invite them to compare it with the original.

Shuffled dictation

Take any text that you’d like to dictate and break it into lines.  Give the students the corresponding number of blank paper strips. Then, read a random line from the text and ask the students to write it down on one of the paper slips. Move on with the next random line. When there are no more lines left, ask the students to put all the slips in the correct order to reconstruct the text. Here the students can work in pairs. Finally, they are given the original text to compare with their version.

Digital dictation

The teacher doesn’t necessarily have to voice the dictation themselves. There are a lot of websites which contain specially recorded dictations for different levels. If your students have trouble dealing with features of connected speech or are preparing for IELTS where they have to be quick spellers as they only hear a recording once, you can provide them with extra practice. Just share a link to one of the websites below. and ask students to have a dictation as part of their homework. They will be able to play the recordings many times and get used to various accents and individual pronunciation features of English speakers. Try out Breaking News English dictation page, English Club online dictations, or these dictation exercises. 

As an option, you can record some text yourself and send it to the students as a sound file for them to transcribe at their own pace. This activity will be really helpful for those with weaker listening skills as the students will not feel embarrassed to ask for a listening activity to be repeated but just replay it themselves.

All in all, dictations can be run in many ways. They can be used in and out of the class, individually or in pairs, at word or text level. They make an excellent springboard for extension activities such as story writing or discussions. This is also a fast and easy way to make your students get used to peer correction or self-checking. So, get your pens ready and let’s write it down!