49 ESL Conversation Games & Activities - Jackie Bolen 2020

Running dictation
English conversation games and activities for all levels

Skills: Writing/Listening/Speaking/Reading

Time: 15 minutes

Level: Beginner to Advanced

Materials Required: The “dictation” + some way to attach it to the walls or board.

This is one of my favorite activities which covers reading, writing, listening and speaking. There are a wide variety of English styles to choose from: poems, song lyrics, a short story, famous quotes—the list is almost limitless. However, to help students improve their conversational skills, choosing a conversation makes the most sense.

For example, make up a conversation a few sentences long (less than ten). Put each sentence on a strip of paper and also put another strip of paper on top to prevent cheating. However, if the classroom is large, consider skipping this last step if the students can't read what's on the paper from where they're sitting. Put these around the classroom in various locations.

The students will be in teams of two. One person is the reader and one is the writer. The reader gets up and reads a bit of the passage and comes and tells it to the writer. They go back to remember more of it and so on and so on. At the end, the students have to put the conversation in order.

With beginner students, make sure it's obvious enough what the correct order should be. Intermediate and advanced students can handle something with a bit of ambiguity. When they're done, check their writing and if there aren't many mistakes plus the order is correct, that team is the winner. How many mistakes you allow depends on the level of your students. The mistakes can happen both in the dictation phase as well as the ordering phase of this activity.

Tell students before the activity starts that standing at the strip of paper and then yelling to their partner instead of walking over to them is not allowed or they will be disqualified. They must use their quiet inside voices.

Here are two examples of running dictations I've used in the past:

Around the house—Intermediate Level

Introduce Yourself—Beginner Level

Teaching Tips:

Make sure to let students know what cheating is (yelling, the “reader/speaker” touching the pen, using a phone camera) and if that happens their team will automatically be disqualified.

Make sure to move beyond simply dictating the sentences down onto the paper into dealing with meaning as well. Do this by requiring students to put the conversation in the correct order. They can simply write “1, 2, 3, 4” beside each sentence instead of re-writing them.

Procedure:

1. Prepare a simple conversation and put each sentence on a strip of paper.

2. Put the papers around the classroom on the wall, equally spaced out.

3. Divide the students into pairs: one writer and one reader.

4. The reader stands up, walks to the station and reads a paper, then goes back to the writer and tells what they read to the writer, who must write it. The reader can go back to a single paper as many times as required.

5. This procedure of reading, speaking, listening, and writing continues until the team has all the sentences down on their paper.

6. The two students put the story or conversation in the correct order.

7. The teacher can check for accuracy and meaning and decide if it's acceptable, or not.