Вариации диктанта.
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Variations on the traditional dictation

When most people hear the word” dictation”, they think of a teacher standing in front of the classroom reading a text line by line, or phrase by phrase, to the students. The teacher has the total control. The students cannot decide how many times they hear the text, nor the rate of speed at which it is read. There is no interaction between the students; in fact, any form of interaction is usually prohibited by the teacher.
     This traditional type of dictation is very typical of a teacher –centered classroom. There is nothing at all communicative about the activity; the teacher is merely transmitting a written text orally in order for the students to write it down   word for word. While this activity, or variations of it, may be used by the teacher to check the students’ ability to understand speech or to check the ability to   recently- presented grammatical structures, its uses are rather limited. There are, however, other forms of dictation that are both communicative and student-centered.
       One of this is the running dictation. Several copies of a short text are stuck to the walls in various places around the room (or even outside in the hallway). Students divide into teams. One member of each team is selected to be the “runner” and the others, recorders. The runner from each team goes to a text on a wall, remembers a phrase or sentence, then runs back to the group to transmit it. Recorders are free to ask the runner to repeat or to seek clarification about anything they haven’t understood. Teams compete with each other to see which group is to finish the text with the fewest errors. The teacher is responsible for preparing the text, observing the activity at a distance, and judging which group is the winner at the end, but, for the most part, it is a student-centered activity. Moreover, in is communicative because the students ask genuine questions of the runners.
       Another type of dictation is the dictogloss. The teacher prepares a short text and reads it at normal speed to the students, asking them to listen to the entire text without writing anything. After the text has been read through once, the students then write down any words or phrases they can remember. After that, in groups they try to reconstruct the text, sharing words that they’ve heard. When they’ve shared as much information as they remember, the text is read again, and the process is repeated. The students determine how much times the text needs to read. After the first reading many students do not believe they can reconstruct the text word for word but, after several readings, they are almost always able to reconstruct it. Although the teacher stands in front of the class and reads the text, this activity also turns out to be very student-centered and communicative in that the students are sharing information they’ve heard and are making a group effort to reconstruct the text.
     Yet another type of dictation is a recorded dictation, in which the teacher records a short text on a disk, then gives it to the students and ask them to write down what they hear. Because the students are given the tape recorder, they have total control over the number of times the recorded text is played, and also over when to stop and replay a certain segment.
      The teacher has to keep the level of students in mind when choosing the length and degree of difficulty of a text. A dictation can be written that includes vocabulary and grammatical structures from recent lessons. If the reduced form of the present perfect has been presented, for example, the teacher саn include examples of it in the text in order to give the students practice in hearing the reduced form.
      As you can see, then, there are several ways to make dictation more student-centered and communicative. The running dictation, dictogloss, and recorded dictation all involve giving students more control over the rate and number of times each phrase or sentence is read. Moreover, each enhances the degree of student-student interaction and promotes more natural use of   language, particularly in terms of the genuine students ask each other to be able to complete the task.