Dictation and decoding
A long time ago I did a Diploma in TEFL and I remember a particular piece of feedback I was given after one of my observed lessons. In this lesson, I’d dictated a series of words to the students. Now, I can’t remember exactly what those words were or why I was dictating them, but I do remember my tutor saying it was ‘unfair’ on students to dictate words they didn’t already know . At the time, that seemed like a pretty reasonable thing to say and for many years after that, I didn’t really do any dictations of that nature again! Unfortunately, this can sometimes be the power of...
