Humanising Language Teaching
Year 3; Issue 2; March 2001
Overwriting
( Section 3 reading )
Level: beginner and post beginner
- Handwrite the reading passage/dialogue you want the students to deal with from the coursebook. Do it neatly and lightly, especially if your students are from non- Roman script languages.
- Give out copies of the hand-written text. Ask the students to work on their own and to "overwrite" all the words they know in the text. ( overwriting is a way of appropriating bits of language.)
- Get the students to put all the words they don't know up on the board and help them with these.
- Ask them to read the text in its printed form in the coursebook.
Note: teachers of Modern Greek and Russian will find this a brilliant exercise for getting students to learn the differences between the printed and hand-written forms of the language.
Acknowledgement: we found this simple, effective technique in Beginning to Write, by Arthur Brookes and Peter Grundy, Cambridge, 1998. Page 23 gives you loads of variations on the overwriting technique.
