Dictogloss And Picture Composition

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These two task types are variations on the same procedure, in that they require the students to reconstruct an original 'text' by supplying more grammar to it, and then comparing their new versions with those of others.

In dictogloss, or grammar dictation (Wajnryb 1990), learners have to listen to and take notes on a short text read aloud to them, before trying to reconstruct the text from their notes. Dictogloss clearly meets all three criteria for designing tasks which emphasize the liberating nature of grammar.

The students move from lexis to grammar as they strive to grammaticize the notes they made while listening to the text; they choose from their own grammatical resources while ...
... reconstructing the text; and finally they compare their versions with one another in order to improve and refine them (Thornbury 1997), before comparing them with the original version.

A particular advantage of dictogloss is that the texts selected (or specially written, as in Wajnryb's 1990 book) can be of any type—descriptive, narrative, argumentative, etc.—depending on the aims of the lesson and needs of the learners.

The example in the Appendix is a paragraph from a Wikipedia entry about the Hubble Telescope, which, if used with an upper-intermediate level academic writing class, perhaps as part of a unit on space exploration, could lead to a focus on various grammatical features such as the use of the present perfect tense in descriptive texts of this kind, structures used with superlative forms of adjectives, and word suffixes (astronomy, astronomer, astronomical).

Picture composition is another traditional technique used in teaching writing which lends itself to this approach to teaching grammar. In order to provide for the 'lexis to grammar' dimension, the sequence of pictures used would need to be accompanied by key words (provided either by the teacher or 'negotiated' with the whole class). In addition, some language can be built into the picture sequence itself, as is typically found in a cartoon strip.

The procedure shown in Figure 3 begins by following a fairly traditional sequence (Steps i to 3) based on a similar task found in Ur 1988 (see the example in the Appendix), but adopts a more structured procedure for focusing on form at Steps 4 to 7, one which is more consistent with the task-based cycle of teaching described by Willis (op. cit.).

I have made the element of comparing texts deliberately less direct in this task, in order to avoid giving the students the impression that the stories which they composed in Step i and edited in Step 4 are less worthy or interesting than the other groups' stories or the teacher's 'version', presented at Step 6. The teacher's version in fact is only a composite of the individual group versions (and it is important that it is presented as such) and is available as a source for comparison at the end of the process when the students correct any errors in their own texts.