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Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 3; May 03
Partial transcriptions
Marshall. Morgan and Rinvolucri
Time: in lesson 1 15 minutes
in lesson 2 30-40 minutes
Purpose: to help students really get inside an oral text, to hear it and feel it fully.
Preparation: arrange for a native speaker to come and speak to the class on one of
two topics, or get one canned on video.
Have a blank cassette and player handy.
Lesson outline:
- The speaker offers two topics and the group chooses the one they prefer. You record the talk.
- In the next class ask each transcriber to introduce their transcription and to explain why they took down the bits they did. After each introduction the students read the particular transcription.
- End with general feedback from the transcribers on how they felt doing the task.
Before the next class you made a couple of re-recordings of the original cassette
In the next class you ask for three volunteers to transcribe the parts of the
talk that they liked, for whatever reason, informational, personal, emotional
or linguistic. Make clear they can transcribe as much or a little as they wish and explain how close to a speaker you can get when you transcribe a text from their voice. Give each volunteer a cassette of the text.
Ask the volunteers to give you their texts before the next class.
Copy the transcriptions for all the students.
Note: you can have students do this as a one-off exercise but the real juice of it lies them getting used to the interpersonal and linguistic thrills of transcription by frequent use of the activity with many different speakers.
