"Four Voice Dictation" after Herbert Puchta

Mario Rinvolucri, UK

Mario Rinvolucri teacher, teacher trainer and author. He has worked for Pilgrims for over 30 years and used to edit Humanising Language Teaching. Regularly contributes to The Teacher Trainer Journal. His recent books include: Creative Writing, with Christine Frank, Helbling, Multiple Intelligences in EFL, with Herbert Puchta, Helbling, Unlocking Self-Expression through NLP, with Judy Baker, Delta Books, New edition of Vocabulary, with John Morgan, OUP, Humanising your Coursebook, Delta Books, Using the Mother Tongue, with Sheelagh Deller, Delta Books, Ways of Doing, with Paul Davis and Barbara Garside, CUP, Imagine That with Herbert Puchta and Jane Arnold, Helbing, Creative Writing with Christine Frank, Helbing. Mario's first CD Rom for students, Mindgame, was written with Isobel Fletcher de Tellez, and engineered and published by Clarity, Hong Kong in 2000. E-mail: mario@pilgrims.co.uk

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Activity

I learnt this marvellous technique from Herbert Puchta in the early 90's of the past century.

1. Split you class up into four groups and have each group congregate in one of the four corners of the room.
2. Ask each group to choose a leader. You take the four leaders outside and give each of them a fourth of a simple story text. You tell them to go back into the classroom and stand in the opposite corner from their group. Their task is to dictate their text across the room to their group despite the noise being made by the other three "dictators".
3. When all four leaders have dictated their text they go over to their groups and help the students check that they have got the text down approximately correctly.
4. Designate the groups as A, B, C,D. Tell the students to form new groups of four with one person from group A, one from group B etc…. The groups of four now have a chance to listen to the whole story as each person reads out their text, in the right order.

Comments

When quadraphonic dictation goes well there is a healthy noise level across the class and the energy level is high. The students are working on realistic listening in that they have to fight off the distraction of irrelevant human sound and tune in exclusively to the voice of their "dictator". This mimics real situations in a cocktail party or on a station concourse.

I remember using this technique with 60-70 soggy, pissed off first year university students in the University of Matsuyama in Japan: miraculously they came to life as they interacted with each other and the absurd foreign lecturer was out of the picture.

Please check the Building Positive Group Dynamics course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.