One Easy Exercise for Paying Attention to Language

Paying attention—really paying attention—is harder than it seems. I spent a good portion of my childhood with either my dad or a coach telling me to keep my eye on the ball. How does one actually DO it? Once as a volleyball coach, I took some old balls, colored each panel in alternating colors, and told players to watch closely and tell me which color panel contacted their arms. 

As an English teacher, I’m always on the lookout for strategies that help students pay that kind of attention to language. Over the years I’ve found a few. Sequencing—of paragraphs or sentences—is one I love. This week I found another in my personal challenge of trying 1 new strategy a week from Larry Ferlazzo’s The ELL Teacher’s Toolbox. It worked so well with my English language learners that I took it to my English language arts class where it worked just as well. 

Hang with me because it doesn’t sound that exciting, but the students were engaged, focused, and energized. They were paying attention to meaning, to vocabulary words; and to sentence structures, grammar, punctuation, and spelling. They practiced listening, note taking, collaboration, speaking, and writing. And it was great review at the beginning of the period of some of yesterday’s content. Ferlazzo calls it “dictogloss.”

Here’s how it goes: I picked a short paragraph that we’d read the previous day. I gave students a half-sheet of scrap paper, and asked them to divide it into thirds. I told them I would read a paragraph they were familiar with several times, and then they would try to recreate.

1. I read the paragraph at normal speed, and students only listened—no writing.
2. I read the paragraph a little more slowly, and students took notes in the top third of the paper.
3. Students paired up and share notes, adding in the middle third of the paper things from their partner or things that occurred to them in the discussion. 
4. I read the paragraph a third time, no notes—only listening.
5. Then students tried to recreate the paragraph I’d read in the bottom third of the paper.
6. When they were done, they could get out the original, compare it, and use a different colored pen to make 3 changes or additions. 

For a middle school language arts class, I used a paragraph of stage directions from the script for “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” that came shortly before class ended the previous day, so on top of all the good language stuff, it also functioned as review of content:

Steve and Charlie can be seen beyond them. They stop once again and turn toward the boy. There’s a murmur in the crowd, a murmur of irritation and concern as if the boy were bringing up fears that shouldn’t be brought up; words which carried with them a strange kind of validity that came without logic but nonetheless registered and had meaning and effect. Again the murmur of reaction from the crowd. Tommy is partly frightened and partly defiant as well.

For a middle school English as a foreign language (EFL) class, I used a paragraph from the textbook (Focus on Grammar 5 [4th edition], Jay Maurer, Pearson. Unit 8):

How did money originate, and where? The Babylonians were the first to develop actual “money” when they started to use gold and silver about 2500 B.C.E. In the succeeding centuries, many other items came to be used as currency, e.g., jewelry, land, and even cattle.

I won’t grade it—at least this time. I got the results I wanted: most students were engaged, and looking over the papers gave me great formative data for who needs help in note taking as well as in a whole variety of other English-y skills. I’ll definitely do this again—not every day, but certainly every week or two.

How do you help students really pay attention to language?