Date: April 21st, 2019
Time: 3:00-5:00pm
Place: English Cafe, Olive Square, Kagawa University
Speaker: Andrew Caldwell
Topic: Dictogloss: Improve Motivation and Participation

Dictogloss: Improve Motivation and Participation

Do you have trouble getting unmotivated students to participate in class? Do you have troubles finding an effective activity for classes with students of varied abilities? Andrew will introduce an interactive and cooperative activity which allows students to integrate the four language skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing into one activity. Dictogloss (also known as Grammar Dictation) is quite different to traditional dictation. It is a type of information gap activity that requires the learners to interact with each other in order to complete a target task. Dictogloss is also an effective motivational tool because it encourages lower-level students to participate in groups and to become more actively involved in their own language learning. Additionally, it also helps to develop the students’ grammatical competence. It was first developed in Australia and can be used with students ranging from junior high to university.

In the workshop Andrew will explain how to prepare, conduct, and analyze a Dictogloss session. In addition, he will discuss his research from 2009 to 2013 on the benefits of using Dictogloss in the classroom. He will also demonstrate some Dictogloss-based activities that he has found to be effective so that the participants to this presentation will have something concrete to take home and use in their own classrooms.

Andrew currently teaches in the Language Education Center at Okayama University. He holds a Masters of Educational Psychology from Temple University Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Originally from Vancouver, Canada, Andrew has taught in Japan for over 18 years