Prepared
Dictation, Editing Activity
In
an effort to give the students I work with in the upper school opportunities
for success in the subject matter they must deal with in projects and
other content oriented tasks, I have found the following activity useful:
-
I
chose two or three sentences from a text they are able to read with
at least some degree of competence. It is useful if there are two
or three subject-specific words in the short passage that they are
not necessarily familiar with.
-
We
read the passage together and then discuss the vocabulary contained
in the passage. We look at spelling hints, context and meaning with
the students understanding they are preparing for a dictation task.
The student then reads the passage silently.
-
I
then remove the student’s copy of the passage and dictate the
contents to them at a rate suitable for the group of students with
whom I am working.
-
When
the dictation process is completed, the students are asked to circle
in pencil any words that they think they have misspelt.
-
I
then return their copies of the original material, and the students
edit their work using the printed version. They use highlighters
to underline actual errors. Errors are then written out several
times.
I have
found that:
- The students
don’t feel as threatened because they have seen the passage
and become familiar with it prior to the dictation activity.
- The student’s
ability to write the dictation improves rapidly over several sessions.
- The speed with
which the students are able to write a passage accurately also improves.
- The students’
ability to identify errors by circling them in pencil, prior to
checking their writing with the original in front of them, becomes
more consistently accurate. That is to say, either there are fewer
errors altogether, or the circled words they thought they had spelt
wrongly are, in fact, the same words they then highlighted as being
actual errors in the final stage of editing. (In the early stages
of the process, students were just as likely to say that a correct
word was an error, as they were to identify an error as correct.)
- Students become
aware of sentence structures and vocabulary relevant to content
areas in a manner which gives them confidence to then apply this
knowledge to their own written work.
Joy
Seary, STLD |
