Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 2; March 03

How and Why EFL Activities Evolve 2

Compiled by Phil Dexter and Richard Cooper

1. Half Story
2. Running Dictation
3. Multiple Stories
4. What's Behind the Story
5. Messenger and Scribe
6. Half the story

Compliers' note
The variations offered below were submitted by five trainers in response to our article “title” published in the last issue of HLT.

Variations on an activity reveal a lot about a teacher's particular interests in training, about the values they want to include in the classroom and about their beliefs as to what best encourages learning. Adapting methodology is perhaps a constant, and in equal parts represents the teacher reaching out and changing the text as the text, as it were, reaching in and changing the teacher.

This interface between published methodology and actual classroom implementation is a like the interface between the sea and the land, the shore being the zone of teacher creativity that combines and moves between the two disparate realms. But why do teachers modify training ideas at all? We would like to offer three observations (and there are surely more):

1) By personalizing an activity teachers internalize it into their idiocentric system of training.
2) Classroom circumstances are inevitably different from those implied or assumed, in the published methodology; as a result, activities must be reshaped to meet those circumstances.
3) The students systematically transform the activities, and the teacher observes these transformations and incorporates them into their training.

But our observations are more assumptions than hard data about the interaction of teachers with methodology. Along these lines, further questions were raised in response to our article by colleague Tom Miller, Ankara, Turkey: The problem is how to generalize from your experience. For example, what can I take from an [activity] and adapt to a completely different activity. How successful were [my] adaptions and why? How did the STUDENT output change as a result of my adaptions and what problems did they have before I made the changes? How typical are the changes I make of teachers in general? Are we talking about evolution in [my] teaching or in teachers in general? How do successful teachers adapt or not compared to unsuccessful ones?

We would welcome comments from readers everywhere about how they feel about using, adapting or rejecting methodology. With more input, our generalizations might tell us more about how teachers create, adapt and learn from their learners and teaching situations.

Half story (based on “Co-operative Open Dictation”, Davis and Rinvolucri, Dictations New Methods, New Possibilities, Cambridge University Press, 1988)

•  With very low levels ask them to write two or three words, rather than sentences or to draw something. Though linguistically minimal, this still gets them psychologically connected to the text and forces them to achieve reasonable comprehension of the dictated bits.

• With beginners I dictate a mixed language text and they write their parts of the text in as much L2 as they can, but falling back where necessary on L1. ( For more of these L1-L2 techniques see Sheelagh Deller et al., Using The Mother Tongue, ETp Delta, 2002)

Running Dictation (based on “The Messenger and the Scribe”, Davis and Rinvolucri, Dictations New Methods, New Possibilities, Cambridge University Press, 1988)

(I think this has become the normal title, the one from the Davis text has not really caught on)

• I have run this as an intra-personal exercise: each student goes to wall to read, without pen or paper, and then goes back to their place and writes down as much as they can remember. So simple, so quiet and so different.

• I have also organised the exercise with teams of three:
  a reader + runner
  a runner + dictator
  a scribe

The reader-runner reads out there in the corridor, and tells the text to the middle person at the classroom door- this person then runs over to the scribe and dictates. This is a livelier verson than the original.