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[nickpellatt]

I did check with my school prior to issuing the no phones / confiscation ruling. I wouldnt have done it without checking. My first term in that college was beset with a number of classroom problems, nothing major, but certainly distracting.

I spoke to the school who suggested each time a student used a phone/listened to MP3 etc etc, that I should stop the class and march them (the offending student) straight to the office. This kinda seemed counter productive, so I made sure they were OK with my rules...and they worked.

I also tend to go along with the no dictionary ruling, and I dont see that as being power hungry or a detriment to learning. In honesty, I have found students using dictionaries constantly are detrimental. Far too often instructions are missed as students are busy looking up words that are often unrelated to the matter at hand. On the basis that they are unable to use dictionaries during the CET4/6 exams, having students rely upon them constantly is something (I feel) hinders their skills at gist comprehension.

I do make some exceptions...but generally my students know dictionaries are only to be used on some occasions.

The reason I went this route was during a simple role play I had set up in a class that related to shopping. This was the final exercise in a chapter in the text book, so vocab had been taught already (and not much of it was new really), and I had modelled the conversation with one student for the class to see.

One of my better students ignored his partner, and had his head buried in a dictionary. I nudged him toward his partner, and walked around class to monitor. When I returned, he was still in the dictionary, and writing down phonetics...and I nudged him again to practice the role play as instructed. Naturally being Chinese, he said 'OK,OK' and ignored my instruction.

The reason? The section in the book had a footnote, which wasnt related to the task at hand in any way, and he was looking up definitions for the words in said note. Ive had that happen too often in class ... hence the rule. Interested to see how other people deal with such learning issues though? Ive had plenty of occasions where learners spend more time looking at the single word they dont know in a text, rather than the other consituents of the sentence that they do know, and often infer meaning.