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g DAY # 7 SESSION TITLE: Dictation: from copying to comprehensive thinking TIME: 35 minutes OBJECTIVES: By the end of the lesson, the Teacher Trainee will be able to: Correctly identify dictation tasks that require higher and lower levels of thinking Restate the learning outcomes of dictation tasks that require different levels of thinking MATERIALS: teacher trainees will each need to have pen and paper, preferably two pens of different colors (one for writing and one for correcting) PROCEEDURES: WARM UP (5-10 min): 1. Write the following mixed-up sentences on the board: we/six oclock/and/tea/drink/get up/at then/walk/seven oclock/to/at/school begin/early/we/school hard/all/students/work/day 2. Tell the teacher trainees that these sentences are mixed up, ask them to rewrite on paper them and make them correct. When the class is finished, correct them as a group (a simple way to do this is to have teacher trainees switch papers with a partner, write the correct answers on the board, and have each person correct their partners paper). 3. Debrief the warm up. What skills did you use in this activity? Did you practice spelling, punctuation, and capitalization? Did you understand the meaning of the sentences? (Hopefully the answer is yes, it was necessary to understand the meaning of the sentences to unscramble them.) ACTIVITIES (20 min): 1. Introduce the days activity (on blackboard): Dictation Explain to the teacher trainees that during this lesson they will complete a series of dictation exercises designed to stimulate different levels of thinking and different levels of English skills. 2. Write on the board and ask trainees to copy the sentence Lili goes to school by bus Discuss the positives and negatives of students copying a teachers writing/writing from the text book Is this interesting? Can students copy without understanding? What do students learn from copying? 3. Cloze exercises: Lili ___________________ by bus Trainees can fill in the blank creatively Facilitator can dictate, teachers fill in the blank 4. Write key words (Lili, school, bus) on the board, have trainees write the full sentence. 5. Draw a picture to replace part of the sentence and have trainees write the full sentence.
6. Write the sentence on the board and ask trainees to write a similar sentence about themselves. 7. Reordering Sentences (warm up) 8. Dictation Dictate the following paragraph for trainees, have them write the sentences: When I first came to China it was very scary. I did not speak any Chinese except, ni hao. I could not understand any of the signs. I could not eat because all the food was spicy. Now, after living here for a while, I am getting used to China and I really love living here. Discuss advantages and disadvantages of writing dictation. Stress that dictation is very helpful for spelling, punctuation, grammar, and listening but does not require students to think independently or use language in context or to express their own ideas (it is not a communicative approach activity). 9. Read a story and write prompts (key words) on the board. Trainees will listen to the story and then write the story in their own words. Prompts (on blackboard): Amy fishing, friends house bus river, tree fishing, a few minutes- Amy thought- fish. Out of the water- boot. Read the text (teachers should not write, just listen) Amy decided to spend the day fishing. She went to her friends house and they took a bus to the river. There, they sat down under a tree and began fishing. After a few minutes, Amy thought she caught a small fish. When she pulled it out of the water, it was an old boot! After teachers have paraphrased, discuss the difference between this type of dictation and the previous type. (Teacher trainees still have to use correct grammar, spelling, capitalization, and punctuation but they ALSO are expressing their own thoughts, creating sentences that have meaning for them ((which means that they are learning better))). CLOSURE / REFLECTION (5-10 min): 1. Discuss with teachers how their completed dictation exercises moved from more mechanical to more comprehensive. Point out that students learn best when moving from concrete to abstract concepts. 2. Dodgeball: a. Write down a dictation task on a piece of paper (ex: sentence with a picture), crumple up the paper, and throw it to a teacher. b. The teacher trainee must say if the task requires more mechanical or more comprehensive thinking to complete (in other words, how much English the student has to understand to complete the task there is some serious wiggle room for right answers here!), as a class, discuss if his/her answer is correct. c. Repeat, either the facilitator or the trainee can write the next task