Editorial
For more ideas see Dialogue Activities reviewed by Lindsay Clandfield in HLT December 2008.
Dialogic Listening
Nick Bilbrough, UK
Nick Bilbrough has been involved in language teaching for nearly twenty years and has taught in three continents in a wide range of different contexts. He now runs teacher development courses, specialising in the use of drama and storytelling techniques, at Horizon Language Training, Totnes, Devon, United Kingdom. http://www.horizonlanguagetraining.co.uk/.
E-mail: nickbilbrough@yahoo.co.uk
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Background
How it works
Extension
Charles Curran’s Community Language Learning works with the premise that language learning is most effective when students have opportunities to express their own ideas. It uses learner generated talk as the basis for any language analysis work. Davis and Rinvolucri wrote extensively about this approach in their brilliant book, Dictation (CUP 1989)
In this variation, adapted from Dialogic Text Building in my book, ‘Dialogue Activities’ (CUP 2007), teacher talk is also thrown into the mix as a way of extending the amount of input provided.
- The teacher writes the title for a text on the board. This should be something that the
teacher knows something about, but that the learners do not. With one class I chose ‘My
year in Japan’
- The learners work in groups to plan and write down questions to ask the teacher about the
topic. The teacher helps out with language issues as they arise. With very low levels they
may initially write their questions in L1 and the teachers helps to rework them into English.
- Learners volunteer to ask the teacher one of their questions. As each person does so she is
given a hand held recording device. When she feels comfortable saying the question in
English, she records it and hands the device back to the teacher. The teacher now records
her response to the question, pitching it at a level which is comprehensible, but still
challenging. Another learner now asks a different question. This process continues until a
conversation of 6 to 10 questions and answers has been built up.
- The recording is now played back to the class (several times if necessary). One of the
following activities (or a combination of them) may now happen:
- the learners orally translate the text back into mother tongue
- the teacher transcribes the complete conversation onto the board, and uses it for some
language analysis work
- the learners transcribe the conversation into their notebooks
- the learners make notes on what was said and then produce comprehension questions for
others to answer about it.
- the learners make notes on what was said and then produce a piece of writing based on the
text (See below for a text produced in this way by a group of pre-intermediate learners in
the UK)
Fifteen years ago Nick lived in Japan to teaching English and visiting his girlfriend. In the first six months he lived in a tiny village and the last six months he lived in a big city. He really suffered from culture shock because they have different culture, and he splitted up his girlfriend. Initially he didn’t learn any Japans because he was just teaching English but after a few months he worked a restaurant to learn Japanese language. He feeled homesick because of that after one year he left Japan and come back to England.
This activity can be repeated as a thread in subsequent classes with different learners taking it in turns to be the person who is interviewed. With this version, the teacher may ask questions herself, and provides language support to the person answering the questions as well as the questioners.
Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
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