Dictogloss for business English

Dictogloss exercises are a great tool for examining whether a student has mastered certain aspects of grammar. Similar to a dictation, a dictogloss exercise consists of a text read out while students write. In contrast to a dictation, the dictogloss is read at normal speed, with students taking notes only to help them reconstruct the text in their own words.

Here's how I did a dictogloss exercise recently with a high-level (C1) one-to-one student of mine.

I was looking for a way of reviewing the new vocabulary and phrases which had come up in our last five or six lessons, but I also wanted something to push my student’s knowledge of grammar rules to its limits. Although my student comes across as a very fluent speaker, I believe this is partly because he chooses grammar structures that he is comfortable with, in order not to risk making mistakes with more complicated structures.

I wrote a short text of around 250 words in 12 sentences using 15 items of selected vocabulary and phrases. This was naturally a very personalized text, because it was directly related to my student and to the topics we had covered in the last few lessons. I read the text at normal speed while he simply listened. Then I read it at normal speed again and asked him to note down the new vocabulary and phrases which had recently come up in class.

He managed to get most of the new words and expressions. I gave him the other vocabulary that he hadn’t noted down, as I wanted to be sure that he was able to use even those expressions that he was less than comfortable with. At home, his task was to reconstruct the text and to email me his version.

As I suspected, when I received my student’s version, there were some grammar errors, particularly with prepositions and phrasal verbs, areas in which he knows he is weaker. But on a positive note, he did manage to use some of the new expressions correctly, such as "get used to + -ing" and "it's worth + -ing".

My feedback sheet consisted of me highlighting (but not correcting) the grammar errors. In our next lesson we corrected his version together. Feedback from my student on this activity was very positive and he really felt he had made progress.

Finally, as a bonus, I recorded the text (using the free downloadable recording software audacity) and gave my student the audio file for him to listen to in his car while driving to work. He found this an invaluable resource. The more a student hears correct language, the more the brain accepts it as normal.

As you can see, dictoglosses are a useful activity in the business English classroom. Business Spotlight provides many suitable short texts, for example in the News section of the website, in the Names and News section of the magazine, or from the Insight section of Business Spotlight Audio. For more on dictogloss activities, I suggest you read Jo Westcombe's excellent article on dictogloss exercises, which explains how they were developed and offers tips on how to use them with groups of students, too.