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Running dictation

Do you ever feel that your students need livening up? Here is a guaranteed way to bring energy to your lesson.

Aim
To develop clearer pronunciation. To wake up a sleepy class!

You need
Choose a short piece of text (e.g. five lines) and make enough copies of the text for one per pair of students.

Procedure

1.

  Stick the texts up around the room, away from where the students are sitting.
     
2.   Put students into pairs and allocate them a text on the wall. Give each pair a text that is far away from them.
     
3.   Now ask one person in each pair to sit where they are with a pen/pencil and paper. Their partner has to stand up and 'run' to their text, read it, probably chunk by chunk, memorise it, run back to their partner and dictate it, helping in any way they can. However they cannot actually write it (eg. 'No, "actually" has got 2 "l"s.' 'There's a new line there.' etc.).
     
4.   The winners are the pair with the first absolutely correct version of the text.

Extension/variation
The activity can then be redone, with a different text and with the other member of the pair acting as 'runner'.

NB This activity can be very noisy so you may need to check with neighbouring classes that it will not disturb them too much.