The Teacher's Autobiography

Teacher dictates batches of personal statements (three true, one false per batch); students identify the false one.

Procedure

1. Prepare several batches of four statements about periods in your life. In each batch, three are true and one is false. For example: I went to primary school. I didn't want to learn to read. I began to love reading. I loved reading history books.
2. Tell students they will hear sets of four statements, one false per set. They write down only the statement they believe to be false.
3. Read each group of statements three times. Suggest students listen carefully the first two times and write during or after the third reading. Give a fourth reading if requested.
4. After the selective dictation, students work in small groups to compare which sentences they picked as false. Give them copies of the statement sets to read through.
5. Finally, read out the actual false statements.

Tips

• A great technique for embedding a target language feature (e.g., time adverbials: two years ago..., verb phrases: I like doing...) which you can highlight after the guesswork.
• Adjust the language complexity of statements to fit your class level.
• Follow-up: students prepare similar sets of statements about themselves and read/dictate to each other, exploring one another's pasts.
• A reduced version with 6-9 sentences (some true, some false) also works well.