Practice "Dictée"

Try an in-class practice dictation.  It will give students a chance to practice before the first quiz.  It will give students a sense of whether or not they are studying enough.

Set-up

Consider choosing a short passage from the book, or an outside reading / realia that you will want to use in class anyway: a piece of a reading passage; a paragraph from a vocabulary presentation; a passage from the listening lab program; part of a poem or passage you'd like to use for pronunciation practice; something funny, topical, etc. Don't make it too long.

Students can correct their own in class. Have answers on an overhead, or have students turn to the page from which the passage is taken in the book.

OR: Have two or three students write the dictation on the board as others do it in their notebooks. Correct the three on the board as a whole group as students correct their own.

Use the whole-group correction of the dictation as a way to teach dictation-taking strategies.

Follow-up

Weave the content of the dictée into the next step of your lesson.

• pronunciation module
• reading comprehension
• a grammar presentation. Example: introduce the passé composé by situating the passage in the past. Teacher and students co-compose the passage in the past with attention to verb form (plant the passage with -er, -ir,-re verbs, or whatever you need), and other stylistic changes to reinforce the function fo the passé composé (add "puis", "tout d'un coup", etc.)

Cheryl Krueger
University of Virginia