Dictation was once a popular exercise, but it has fallen out of favour in the contemporary language classroom and has even disappeared from the syllabus in most teacher training programmes. Dictation isn't communicative and doesn't model authentic language usage. Most of us would be hard-pressed to find real life examples of someone asking us to take pen and paper and write down exactly what he says. However, not every exercise in a "communicative" classroom is either communicative or authentic.

Students often react favourably to non-communicative activities, such as gap-fill grammar exercises. Nor is authenticity an end in itself. Authenticity is a means to the end of successful language teaching. If certain non-authentic exercises can be used efficiently, there is no need to object to them on theoretical grounds.

Dictation may have new relevance in the light of the lexical approach to teaching, which down plays the role of grammar and highlights language learning through acquiring words, collocations, and lexical chunks. Dictation doesn't judge correctness by students' knowledge of structure, but by their ability to get all the words right. Through dictation, language is presented, not explained, allowing learners' contact to be experiential, so that they can make their own observations and draw their own conclusions.

So, if there is value in dictation, isn't it time that we relearn some forgotten skills? To do a standard, old-fashioned dictation, do the following. Select a text, at or slightly below the students' current level. The text should be no longer than one which can be read in one minute at a natural rate of speech. Lead a warm-up discussion on the topic of the dictation and pre-teach any difficult vocabulary items.

Read the text once at a natural rate of speech, while the students listen without writing anything. Read the text again, slowly enough for students to write, repeating each meaningful group of words twice. Read the entire text again slightly more slowly than a normal rate of speech. This allows students to check their work. Show the students the correct form of the text and give students time to check their writing. The entire exercise should take between 10 and 20 minutes.

Exercising texts

Dictation can be frustrating for students the first time round. However, with regular practice, students normally show marked improvement. Dictation is an exercise, not a test, and students should be assured that it is not a sign of low English ability to make mistakes or fail to understand words or passages.

Selecting texts is largely a teacher's decision based on the needs and abilities of a particular class. Above all, it is vital that students should find the texts interesting.

Classes of average ability should be given texts that are more or less at their level, with currently studied structures and vocabulary reinforced through dictation. Low-level classes may require texts recycling old structures and vocabulary. For highly motivated classes, new structures and unfamiliar vocabulary can be introduced through dictation, with students guessing meaning through context as a follow-up activity.

Texts may come straight from the textbook, be a modified form of a textbook passage, or be teacher-created. If using authentic source material, selections from news-papers and magazines are what usually come to teachers' minds first, but don't exclude fiction, poetry, letters, texts of emails, and dialogues.

Recorded radio or TV dialogues, or recordings of either real or scripted conversations can serve as texts. This adds an aspect of authenticity and exposes students to other voices and accents.

Students themselves may take turns choosing the text. At lower levels, it is generally better to use a series of single sentences, while at intermediate and upper levels paragraphs or longer pieces of coherent unified text can be used.

During a dictation exercise, students concentrate mostly on form. Using the text to lead into a discussion or debate allows students to focus on the meaning of the text, and to recycle structures and vocabulary to express themselves on the topic. As the skills of listening, reading and writing have been practised during the dictation, a discussion afterwards makes it a fully integrated activity.

The teacher may also prepare some comprehension questions that can be asked and answered as a speaking exercise.

The text may also be exploited for attention to discrete points, such as finding all the silent letters or double letters, finding certain letter combination (for example, all the ths, or all the -ly adverbs), different spellings of a certain phoneme (for example, made, day, break, paid, weigh, grey), or all words related to a theme (such as cooking/holidays/sport).

Putting on a dictogloss

One criticism of traditional dictation is its focus on form and the parroting of language rather than any meaningful communication or originality. With the development of the communicative approach, a new form of dictation, dictogloss, emerged.

In this variation of dictation the text is first read to the students at a normal rate of speech, while students simply listen. The text is read again slightly more slowly, with students taking notes but not trying to write down everything word for word. Students are then put in pairs, and they use their notes to reconstruct the text as accurately as possible.

Students use each other as resources to write the text, then check their texts against the original, and are asked to identify differences in both form and meaning, and to identify any errors in structure or spelling.

Unlike traditional dictation, dictogloss integrates all four skills: listening when the text is first read; writing both notes and the final draft; reading the notes, partner's notes, and the original text; and speaking when students speak to each other in their pairs. As students' attention is focused on meaning, not form, this style of dictation becomes a communicative writing activity.

The Guardian