This idea can get the students working in the three skills of reading, writing and listening all at once. It eats up minutes if you ever need that to happen. Level 1 kids obviously can’t do it right now, but gnarly upper level classes that you are just trying to make it to the end of the period with can be dealt with with this idea that I call Self Dictée.
Here’s how it works:
Tell some story, anything, some aspect of culture or something that happened on the way to work, whatever, as per Story Listening, but at the same time write it.
Say your first sentence:
A man got up about 6:00 a.m. one morning on his farm in the south of France.
Say it several times.
Then, instead of going to the next sentence, go to your computer and open up Word and write that first sentence down and project it, or write it on the board. Notice that as you are writing the kids will be reading intently, but they will also be listening, of course, since you will be speaking the sentence as you type it, dictating it to yourself but in a loud voice that everyone can hear, hence the term Self-Dictée.
The kids will be reading too, and so you will be requiring them to work in all three skills at once.
So to review, the way it works is:
1. Say a sentence and repeat it several times.
2. Go to the computer and say the sentence again while typing it and projecting it up onto the screen, loudly dictating it to yourself with nice pauses between the words. They read it, and of course in those moments of reading they are listening because you are saying it but also typing it. They are also learning how to write, because you are demonstrating writing, at the same time they are reading, and of course they are getting a nice auditory repeat of the original sentence.
The simultaneous speaking and writing and listening is obviously not how dictée works usually, of course. It’s a different form of dictée. It really gets the kids focused. Their eyes are totally focused on reading, to see if it matches up with what they first heard in the first step above. But they are unconsciously learning to write as well. Except for my auditory superstars, who don’t seem to care much about the writing since it’s not their learning style, most of the kids, who have been beaten into a visual way of learning in school, really like reading the text that I dictate to myself out loud for their benefit.
Notes:
1. I recommend writing the story down and projecting it in the present tense, in French at least, because there are far fewer accents to mess with on the keyboard when writing in the French present tense. If you want to write in the past (French only) you could write it on the board so you don’t have to mess w the accent short cuts.
2. If the class has a bunch of jerks, make them write the sentences that they see appearing on the screen. It’ll really slow the process down and use up lots of valuable minutes (more writing does not mean more gains in writing), but it will also shut their mouths.
3. Note importantly that you don’t need a script for this. You can just make each sentence up as you go along, as long as you have the general story line in your head.
4. This is a monster time eater. But the kids often have a look of total focus on their faces the whole time.
5. There are probably variations on this but my thinking on this self-dictée idea is that the kids can’t talk. Susan Gross had a variation where she and the class made up a story together, but in this case, as with all dictée (see category) it is most important that the class read from the screen individually in total silence – that is where the power comes from. So better to do it that way for five minutes then for half an hour where the kids are talking, sharing ideas, which always degenerates into lots of English, and lots of English always means virtually no CI.