My "beeped" experience in Vietnam

For a high-level fully-integrative classroom activity, I often like to do "beeped" dictations. I dictate a text while students try to write down everything I say; but in the "beeped" version, I leave out certain words and say "beep" in replacement, where students are instructed to draw a line in the place of the word, and at the end they must try to figure out what those blanked words were. This activity is superb because it engages and synthesizes many different language skills: listening, writing, analytical, grammar. And if it's a group format, they must collaborate in teams, communicate in English, and do a lot of problem-solving.

For the last class of one of my pre-intermediate adult classes, I decided to use this activity as a final skills-consolidation activity and also as an opportunity for me to share my experience living in Saigon as a way to say goodbye to this class which I was really fond of.

In groups of 3, five teams in the class listened to me dictate a small story broken down into four separate parts. Each part was read three times each, with small breaks in between where students had to share their notes and collaborate with each other in order to reconstruct as much of my dictated text as possible. At the end of the whole dictation, they are given ample time to put their heads together and try to deduce the missing words. The missing words could be grammar words (testing their knowledge of the different verb tenses they had learned) or vocabulary words.

At the end, a member from each team is invited to the board to write down their final words which their team had agreed must be the missing 23 words from the dictation. Then, we go through the whole dictation together on the projected screen, and as a class, we take up the missing words one by one while also addressing the validity of the students' guessed words and why they could or couldn't be correct. The team that has the most correct words wins!

In sum, this is a perfect wholly-integrative exercise which greatly challenges students and allows them to utilize their language skills through independent thinking as well as team-working. It is also very rewarding at the end when teams exclaim in pride at their successful words and have fun with the competitive spirit.