In September, I will take on my first ever role as Head of Department in Languages. I have been teaching for over 23 years and this is a role that, thus far, has eluded me. I am both nervous and excited, but overall very keen to do the best job I can by the students and my wonderful team. One of my first jobs will be to start looking at how to adapt our exisiting SoW to include more dictation tasks, in light of the new GCSE.
I have spent some of the holidays co-authoring a dictation resource pack for the lovely folk at www.teachitlanguages.co.uk and thought I would share a quick blog post with some top tips:
Top tips:
- Be overt in the teaching of dictation / transcription skills – make this a regular and planned part of your teaching repertoire.
- Work on students’ phonic awareness first.
- Build students’ confidence over time – start in KS3 or earlier!
- Develop students’ transcription skills gradually and in a measured and progressive way so as not to make dictation something to be feared.
- If, as the teacher, you are worried that dictation is boring, you can spice it up with your delivery:
-Use exaggerated intonation / silly voices e.g. robot
-Use gestures to drop hints and add some fun (e.g. arm gestures for accents)
-Deliberately use very slow / fast / loud / quiet delivery
- Ask pupils for their ideas.
- Make it as engaging as possible!
Do look out for our dictation packs (French, Spanish and German) in the coming month and in the meantime you may be interested to read these blogs / watch these webinars to start thinking about any possible changes you might make to existing SoW before or frrom September :
Esmeralda Salgado https://mflcraft.blogspot.com/ https://mflcraft.blogspot.com/2023/01/dictation-new-really-kid-on-block-9.html?fbclid=IwAR05T3tth4bgStSwtrdxF2eIAh16kzvRadhQiikVD-bhzpqqiYbFErz6CN4 |
Jake Hunton
Steve Smith
Gianfranco Conti