Teacher Discussion Forums

Hi,

I was wondering if any of you who do dictations with your students could give me some pointers about scoring them. Do you score differently if you dictate a list of words and not a list of sentences (and vice versa)?Does every misspelt word count as a mistake, or would you give half a point for something that is almost good?

Thanks for your help in advance.

Ildi

We had a great discussion earlier on this topic. I will try to find it. http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... highlight=
My students in Greenland, Mongolia and Japan all adored dictations. I think it is kind of mindless and easy for some of them and ordered for those who like order and competitive for those who like competition. I didn't find it did anything of value for the lower group of students at all except it provided them with a lot of frustration.
I gave them the passage that I was going to dictate the day before. The next day, I read it quickly and finally, slowly. Then I allowed them to meet in groups and correct anything that they didn't get on the second pass through. The topic was part of the area of study we were doing at them moment - a passage of dialogue from a film, a part of a poem and so on. Finally, I got them to take out their copy of the correct version and mark their own and think of something to remember correct spelling and write a sentence with faulty grammar errors. We had a special binder with these dictations and they could recopy the final version with decorations to show the parents on parent's night. I found near the end of the year that I could divide them into smaller groups and have one person chose the topic and dictate to the other two or three in their group. This provided more variety in the topics and they chose topics more interesting to their age group. When they wanted a spelling test or dictation, they chose words out of their personal dictionaries. I gave them small address books and they put words in there that showed up in various activities, either that they liked or because they misspelled it often. I paired them up and they dictated 10 words or so from the other person's spelling dictionary. We had competitions with prizes for students who bettered their score from the last time or the person who spelled the longest word and so one, changing the challenge each time. We had a class contest Spelling Bee in front of the whole school and that was a lot of fun with teams cheering on the best spellers in the class but also writing down the word themselves and handing it in to markers who added a point to the class representative if more than 3/4 of the class got the word right and so on.