Run and Write

• A dictation activity that uses

all four skills in English:

• Reading

• Speaking

• Listening

• Writing

• Several copies of the dictation text will be posted at the front of the classroom.

• You will be able to look at the original text after the activity is finished.

• Here are the instructions:

1. Each group chooses one student to be the “Reader.”

2. The Reader goes up and reads some of the written text….

“It was a darkand stormynight….”

3. … then comes back and tells it to the other group members.

“I’m coming!”

4. The others listen, ask for clarification, and write it down.

5. Repeat until it is all done.

6. The goal is make an exact copy of the text (including punctuation).

“It was a darkand stormynight….”

“It was a darkand stormynight….”

READY?READY?

GO!GO!

Check your results:

• Each student will receive a copy of the text.

• Check your results – how close did you get to the original?

• Which words were most difficult to understand?

• How many words did you ask the Reader to spell?

Sample text to use:

The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951)

by Carson McCullers.

Reading / fluency practice: This is the opening paragraph from The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951) by Carson McCullers. Practice reading it until it feels comfortable for you. Concentrate on your fluency or smooth speaking, and on pronunciation. Then, look at a phrase or part of a sentence, and before speaking it, look up. Note the places where your voice rises or falls (intonation).

The town itself is dreary; not much is there except the cotton mill, the two-room houses where the workers live, a few peach trees, a church with two colored windows, and a miserable main street only a hundred yards long. On Saturdays the tenants from the near-by farms come in for a day of talk and trade. Otherwise the town is lonesome, sad, and like a place that is far off and estranged from all other places in the world. The nearest train stop is Society City, and the Greyhound and White Bus Lines use the Forks Falls Road which is three miles away. The winters here are short and raw, the summers white with glare and fiery hot.

Vocabulary:

• dreary dull, boring

• cotton mill a factory for making cotton fabric

• miserable depressing or ugly

• tenants someone who rents farmland

• estranged separated

• raw unbearably cold

• glare very bright light

Discussion / comprehension:

What kind of tone (emotion or atmosphere) does this writing have?

Have you known a place like this?

Roger Jones

ILTS, Sichuan University

Chengdu, Sichuan, China

2011