Many of us were taken by surprise when the first lockdown was announced in 2020. Initially, our focus fell on what was closest to hand—digital coursebooks if we had them, or scans of the pages we wanted to cover in our lessons. However, over time, more and more ideas began to surface about how we could shift our attitude toward online teaching from “survive” to “thrive.”

I speak for the majority of teachers, I assume, when I say that we would rather be teaching face-to-face, but there are definitely advantages to online teaching, and if not advantages per se at least there are some activities that work better online than in the traditional classroom.

Today I want to talk about an activity that is simple to do, that gets your students talking, and that works far better online than off.

A Picture Dictation Adaptation

We all know how picture dictations work. One person draws a picture—perhaps it shows their living room—and then, keeping their own picture hidden, they dictate to a partner so that the partner produces a facsimile of the original. This activity is a twisted take on the idea of dictation and reproduction. It works like this:

1. First, I choose a short text—a couple of sentences is sufficient. This could be from the coursebook, or, level permitting, something authentic—the first part of a newspaper article, for instance.

1. Then, I record myself on Vocaroo, an online voice recording app. I read the text—but, importantly, I do so dramatically, or mournfully, or excitedly; the point is to make the delivery interesting. As an example, here is me reading the first paragraph of this article.

1. Next, I ask one of my students to read the same text out loud, without having listened to my version of the reading.

2. My job is to suggest ways in which the student can get closer to the recording I made. So, I could suggest, for instance, that they need to sound sad in the first two sentences, to pause dramatically around “however,” and that in the last stretch they need to sound more upbeat.
   
   Following my feedback, the student reads the text again, trying to convey the same feelings as in the original recording. When the student feels confident enough with their delivery, I invite them to record their attempt on Vocaroo; we then listen to the original, and compare.

Students Work Together

Once the task has been modelled in this way, it’s time to hand the reins to the other students. They can work in groups of three. The first mutes themselves on Zoom (or whichever teaching app you’re using) and records their chosen passage. They then share the link to the recording with the second student, while the third looks at the text and gets ready to read it. The job of the second student is to guide the third, offering feedback as necessary, until the third student is able to reproduce the first student’s original.

Using Vocaroo really couldn’t be simpler—when you land on the main page, there is a big red button to press that begins the recording. You press “Stop” to finish recording, and then the “Save and Share” function allows the recording to be, well, saved and shared. All of this happens on the site itself, meaning that there’s no fussy software to mess around with, and no file sharing headaches.

In Closing

This little activity has worked well for me on the occasions when I have used it in class, and, depending on the content you use, can be adapted for use with almost every age and level. It’s fun, certainly, but it also gets students to think about pronunciation beyond the word level and to consider sentence stress and intonation patterns a lot more.

It’s also a great example of the kind of task perfectly suited to the online realm—one that works better than it likely could in the offline classroom.

Christopher Walker has spent the last decade teaching English at International House Bielsko-Biala in the south of Poland. In that time, he has also worked as the school’s exams coordinator, and he is currently responsible for teacher training. He is an experienced conference speaker and is always happy to talk to teachers anywhere in the world about teaching techniques and teacher development. He has a website at www.closelyobserved.com.