Guided Dictation

Content words from the dictation text are written on the board as support, allowing learners to focus on function words and longer phrases during dictation.

Procedure

1. Before dictating, write the nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs from the text on the board in the same order they appear in the text, grouped by sentence.
2. Read the dictation. Because the content words are visible, learners can focus attention on the other difficult words (articles, prepositions, conjunctions, etc.).
3. If words are grouped by sentence on the board, read whole sentences at once rather than short phrases, since the board support helps learners remember complete sentences.

Example

Board shows: person... die... Bali... family... friend... usually... sad Full sentence: When a person dies in Bali, the family and friends are not usually sad.

Tips

• This technique makes dictation accessible to lower-proficiency learners while still requiring active processing.
• Particularly useful for drawing attention to function words, which learners often overlook.
• Can be gradually made harder by writing fewer words on the board.