Humanising Language Teaching
Year 3; Issue 1; January 2001
Student dictates Story to Teacher
Type of class: monolingual
Teacher: needs to know the student's mother tongue
Level: beginner to elementary
Purpose: reading comprehension of a short text.
to encourage students to think linguistically
- Ask one of the students to come to the next class ready to tell a personal
story is as few words as possible and in mother tongue.
- In the next class the student dictates his/her story slowly, and you put it up
in the TL on the board. Add the MT translation of every fourth or fifth
word. Write this below the word and in much smaller letters.
- Stand back and allow the students to ask you any questions they want about the
text on the board. The question can be about meaning, grammar, pronunciation,
what ever they want.
- Ask the students to copy their classmate's text from the board.
Note: this activity is well worth doing regularly with a beginners class- it can be good if they have a special note book for their classmate's stories.
Acknowledgement: This technique follows the common sense approach of Charles Curran's Community Language Learning, which holds that the most relevant and memorable text will come from the students.
