Run and write
From Wikigogy
- lesson
- 4 skill
- 20min 30min
- high_school college postgrad adult
- China
Get a passage of English writing, chosen for the level of your students. It should be something they can read large parts of, but will have some trouble with. Project Gutenberg, http://gutenberg.org is an excellent source. Among other things, it has complete works of the major 19th century authors — Dickens, Kipling, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Mark Twain, ... For many students, the opening few paragraphs of "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" are a good choice. For Chinese with high intermediate or advanced English, a chunk of Marco Polo goes down well,
Make several copies and stick them up at various places in the classroom.
Students work in pairs:
- one goes up, reads some of the passage, comes back and tells the other
- the other listens, perhaps asks for clarification, and writes it down
Repeat until it is all done. Then change the passage and switch roles in each pair.
The goal is make an exact copy of the text; this is not a summarise or get-the-gist exercise.
Some teachers make this a contest between pairs. That is fine, as long as you include an accuracy check so doing it fast and badly is not rewarded.
