You can use with any level group from KS2 to A level, with any number of students from two. Use it to practise dialogues, role-plays, short texts, and grammatical structures – anything your students would find interesting. This task involves speaking, listening, reading and writing. It is an activity, which students enjoy as it is a race!

Organising a running dictation

• Choose a short text at the right level for your group or class.

• Photocopy several examples of the text depending on the size of your class. Pin the examples up on the walls of the room where you are working. The challenge for each group is for them to reproduce a written form of the text you choose.

• Explain that each group or pair must choose one person to write down a text.

• Depending on the size of your groups, explain that the other members of the group will leave take turns to go and read the text you have pinned up on the wall. It is very important that only one person from each group is reading and memorising at any one time.

• That person memorises as much as s/he can and then returns to the group to dictate what they have remembered to the other members of the group. The student chosen to do the writing must write down what it is said as accurately as possible. When the person reading and running has come to the end of what they have remembered, the next person in the group sets off.

• Continue like this until the group has written down the whole version of the text.

• The group that finishes first is the winner!

Marking the written text

Method 1

The winning group has 100 points. Second place - 90 points, third place - 80 points and so on. Groups swap versions and are given your correct version of the text, which they use to mark another group’s version. For each error that a group has made, a point is