Tag Archives: mother tongue

HOMEWORK AS FLIPPED LEARNING, and CHECKING HOMEWORK

31.10.2025 Raimo J Leave a comment

‘Flipped learning’ means getting to know the content of the next lesson at home in advance. This is what Finnish student do at home. We have found it an excellent thing for 50 years now.

So, one thing in foreign language teaching in Finland that has never changed even if new methods and ideas such as CLT have been introduced is what the students do at home:

Finnish students have always had to ‘translate’ or ‘study’ the textbook chapter of the next lesson in advance at home. It is a MUST. Much more important than having written exercises done.

The idea above may sound old-fashioned but the benefits are undeniable. There is no point in such a thing as working on a new chapter understanding half or even less of the content.

I have always first taught my students, especially if they are young, how the translation must take place in their minds . It is certainly worth a lesson or two. Usually there are always some students among 12 – 13-year-olds who learn this skill in groups for the first time in their lives. A good student is an ideal the ‘teacher’ in the group showing the others how the translation is done.

On some occasions doing a partial translation of the text into mother tongue can reveal massive gaps in the students’ reading comprehension. Even in some senior high classes some students have no idea how to translate the text. Remedial teaching for two weeks and they will get a hang of it. And then the foundation for learning is established. The final aim is to skip translation part at school altogether.

Reasons why advance home study / translations are vital

First, there is no point in spending much time in the lesson checking the understanding of a text by translation into one’s mother tongue. Nevertheless, in the early stages of learning a new language translating the texts into the mother tongue is a must.
Secondly, when we insist on the students doing the translation at home in peace and quiet at their own pace, precious time in lessons is saved for oral practices.
Thirdly, as for the translation itself, the skill itself must not be taken for granted. It has to be taught separately since some students do not know how it should take place.
To get started with translating a text the students have to know the meanings of the words in the chapter. In Finland we have always been lucky to have Finnish – English vocabulary lists for every chapter in the students’ workbooks. New words are introduced there and a lot of time is saved compared to using a dictionary every time a new word emerges in the text.
What if the word is not in the word list or there is no such list available? We advise the students to consult a dictionary, a free one in the internet is the best option these days. The use of Google translator is an option too but it requires very little thought from the student’s part and deep-level learning suffers. Some modern electronic textbooks have an inbuilt dictionary as a quick tool.
The best part in forcing the students to consult the wordlists is that by the time they have finished the ‘translation’ homework they will have done something with the new words half a dozen times learning them subconsciously. At least from English into their mother tongue.
For the teacher it should not matter whether the translation is written in the notebook, translation of new words on top of the text lines or the student has the translation only in his/her head. As long as the student can promply give the translation in lesson, using a source or not, everything is ok.
Once the translation skill has been learnt and the habit established less and less time in the lesson is spent on checking the understanding this way. It is taken for granted that the students have studied/translated the new chapter at home before the lesson.
When the students come to class having studied the new text at home, they feel safe and confident. It is a long and boring lesson if they understand nothing of what is going on.

The foundation of every language lesson is studying or translating the new text beforehand at home (in the flipped learning style). It saves time and the students feel more confident in class.

CHECKING WRITTEN OR ORAL HOMEWORK

“Nothing new under the sun.” Not quite since my favourite, Number 2 Student-oriented checking of homework is very different from what I used at the beginning of my career.

When the lesson starts we tend to check the written and oral tasks that were part of the homework. This checking should not eat up too much of our time since the learning took place while the students were doing the exercises. Still, they need to know if their answers are correct or not and ideally this should also be a learning situation.

There are some ways to speed up the checking process and make it more efficient from the students’ point of view.

1 Teacher-oriented checking: The teacher does not get the answers at all from the students but correct answers are revealed little by little on the screen and the students quietly correct their mistakes. The teacher scrolls the text on the screen or he/she uses Power Point animations to hide the answers. Thus the teacher controls the time spent on each exercise. At the end the students are, of course, allowed to ask questions.

Of course, the old style ‘Checking written homework so that the teacher asks and one student at a time answers’ is also possible but it is more time-consuming.

2 Student-oriented checking: Each pair or group is given the correct answers on paper or on the screen and they do the checking themselves within the time given. What is good about this way of checking is that the students advise each other and checking becomes a learning situation too.

If this style is adapted, the teacher should tell the students why you are doing it and what the responsibilities of the students are. While the checking is going on the teacher has to go around the class to observe if someone’s homework is not done.

3 Checking can also be part of station work: If there are, for example, 5 stations/sets of tables, one can be devoted to checking homework. Station work or Work stations are effective as a special kind of group work. See how you can arrange a lesson like it.

N.B. Some teacher use a Google form where the students mark which of the exercises they have done. It is a public file within the class and the students easily point out if someone is trying to cheat. This file is also a document for the teacher and it can be taken into account when grades are given for the course.

The most important piece of homework: studying/translating the textbook chapter of the next lesson in advance at home.

1 Studying the chapter at home in advance
2 Checkingwritten or oral homework exercises
3 Working orally on the new words of the next chapter
4 Listening to the chapter on a CD, DVD, via the internet or read by the teacher
5 Checking if the content was understood, clarifications
6 Reading the text aloud
7 Questions on the text, or multiple choice, true-false, black holes …
8 Doing oral (and written exercises/underlining the text) in class

Grammar

GRAMMAR

31.10.2025 Raimo J 1 Comment

My own road to master the English grammar was different.

Grammar – an oasis or a desert? For me it first was neither since I did not need it. I had learnt most of my English grammar from songs. Later on at the university I had to learn the rules as well to be able to teach them at school. While studying other languages I started to admire the beauty of grammar in other languages, too. So, these days grammar is an oasis for me. Move the arrows and make your choice!

In the early years of CLT many linguists and some teachers started to feel teaching grammar was not important and even ignored it. Fortunately, this attitude turned out to be impossible in practice and we kept on teaching grammar – but not exactly like we had done before.

There were three drastic and permanent changes in practising new grammatical structures thanks to comminicative language teaching:

Firstly, CLT teachers realized that we must make use of 3 kinds/levels of exercises in practising grammar: 1) mechanical, 2) semi-communicative and 3) communicative exercises and tasks. Up to that point exercises had nearly always been mechanical.
Secondly, having learnt the rules and having done a couple of written mechanical exercises, we moved on doing ‘authentic’ oral activities in pairs and groups. In brief, the focus was in doing oral grammatical exercises at 3 levels, instead of written ones. I will explain ‘how’ in the next articles.
Thirdly, CLT teachers realized that differentiation was needed in mixed-ability classes since some students did mainly only mechanical exercises while the best ones were able to move straight on to using the new structures in free speech or activities.

Three methods in teaching grammatical rules

Grammatical structures and rules can be taught using ‘the inductive or deductive method’ or they can be learnt without any rules just by being exposed to the new language a lot; pretty much the way mother tongues are learnt.

Most teachers know the term ‘inductive method’ of teaching grammar, which means the formulation of the rules on the basis on examples.
It is contrasted with the ‘deductive method’ which means the teacher explains the rules in detail and then lets the students practise and apply the rules. This is the easy way out in teaching grammar. The teacher thinks ‘I taught you the rules and it is up to you to learn them. Practise and we need to move on.’
The third ‘method’ is the lexical approach to teaching grammar which means learning grammatical structures as ‘chunks’ ; i.e. word combinations, words, set phrases or set structures. With minimum reference to any rules it is very similar to the learning of mother tongue. The Dodson method is based on chunks as well but it makes heavy use of the mother tongue.

I will deal with the communicative teaching of grammar, the inductive and deductive methods as well as the lexical approach and the Dodson method in much more detail in separate articles.

Few people like grammar. Grammar is just a tool, not the aim of language teaching. And it is not always a must. Like me, the English grammar can be learnt from games, songs or any other source without official teaching, without the learner realizing it!

My own history on learning and teaching the English grammar

Now I am going to have a look at my own experiences as the learner and teacher of grammar. My road to the English grammar was different.

A lot of input in a foreign language can lead to subconscious learning of grammar without knowledge of the rules.

I used to have an ambivalent attitude to grammar. When I went to the university in the early 1970s and had been accepted to study English, I knew very few rules of the English language. Still, even if I only wrote one essay in all my school years, I mastered the written language rather well. How come? It was at that time it dawned on me that I must have learnt the rules subconsciously while singing in English and spending a lot of my time listening to songs and writing down the lyrics. So I am a living example that one does not need to study any rules of a foreign language to learn it, provided we are exposed to the language for a long time, usually thanks to our hobby that involves the use of the foreign language.

So, I must have learnt the grammatical elements as chunks, lexical units of various length, and then generalized the models to cover different situations as well.

A teacher has to know the grammatical rules to be able to justify his/her marking of essays, exams and oral presentations.

Consequently, I was in deep trouble when I started teaching English before I had taken my official grammar tests at the university. For instance, I was amazed about the difficulty of making questions in English just three hours before I had to teach the rules to my evening class. When to use ‘do, does, did’ and when to leave them out and under what circumstances! What are auxuliaries and what is their roles in questions? It was all Hebrew to me! I was sweating like a little pig before the lesson. Luckily I did not know most of the adult students were teachers themselves and six of them were heads of their school.

Of course, I had to learn all the rules of English rather quickly and I actually enjoyed explaining the students why particular structures were considered wrong or inappropriate. Even more so, I enjoyed presenting grammar rules so that minimum number of grammatical terms needed to be used and the learning was logical, proceeded step by step and included a lot of oral practising.

However, I realized my road to mastering the English grammar is not a common one and therefore I have always used the inductive method in introducing most of the new grammatical points.

In some rare cases I have been applying the deductive method or the lexical approach to teaching grammar. They all work well but the success in using them depends on the proficiency level of the class. In other words, what kind of learners they are and how good their English is.

Let’s face it. If you go to the city centre and shout out ‘I know the English grammar in and out!’ no-one will be impressed.

But if you speak beautiful English with correct grammar in your utterances, some people might be impressed.

The following matters will be discussed in my next articles.

Grammar	Communicative grammar, tasks and differentiation
	The inductive and deductive method in teaching grammar
	Grammar in the ‘good old days’
	Teaching grammar the old style and CLT style, comparison
	Teaching young beginners grammar, the lexical approach
	The Dodson bilingual method

Yleinen

VOCABULARY

31.10.2025 Raimo J 2 Comments

We are all different and learn words in a different way. That is why we need to let our students experiment and find their own style or strategy of learning words. Here the term ‘strategy’ simply means a certain way or approach to enhance learning new words.

Miniature N.Y. Brooklyn Bridge in a Bangkok mall. I am a very visual learner and therefore I love to use photos and pictures in my teaching

It is sometimes argued that new words should be learnt in a sentence/context first and I agree. Still, I believe they should be practiced in isolation as well since there are many things to learn about every word. In the approach I recommend below most of the learning takes place at sentence/utterance level:

The other articles under Vocabulary heading are

Knowing a word, What does it really mean?
Identify 22 strategies to learn new words
Getting students to design vocab tasks, Points 1-10
Getting students to design vocab tasks, Points 11-22

A summary of my philosophy on learning new words

At home: in advance before the new lesson: New words are preferably first encountered in the sentences of new texts/chapters at home (as part of homework).
At home: The students automatically try to guess/figure out the meanings of the new words. If they fail, they consult the workbook word lists or a dictionary. An excellent learning situation because a lot of thought is involved in the silent mental process.
At home: If the student doubts he/she will not remember the words, I advise them to write the translation on top of the textbook line or in their notebooks. Still, occasionally we learn new words without knowing the exact meaning because the words are constantly repeated in a context.
At school the words are repeated after the teacher to learn how they are pronounced and at the same time the meanings of the words are revised.
The use of words is practised orally in pairs, preferrably by making sentences or even stories of one’s own using as many of these new words as possible.
The chapter is listened to, read aloud and reading comprehension checked in many ways, all of it at sentence level.
Invisible differentiation (the students choose freely from options what to do, no stigma attached on tasks) is involved all the time and the final stage for the best students is to produce ideas of their own making use of the new words under the topic in question. Even the weakest students learn new words in a relaxed atmosphere answering questions on the text in pairs.
We all learn new words differently depending on our style and personal characteristics. That is why we teachers need to offer our students a set of options / strategies and then they can start using the strategies that appeal to them.

There is so much more we can do to learn new words than doing exercises in the workbook.

22 strategies to learn new words

Which ones have you already been teaching? Which one have you never thought about? Choose the 5 best ways YOU learn new words best!

I hope to be able to add some videos on these strategies later on.

Link the new word with a picture or photo.
Link the new word to your mother tongue.
Write the unknown words of the chapter on a paper and make up a mindmap or a story.
Associate the new word with another (funny) word, story or setting. Explain to your pair how the association works for you.
Record a word list on your phone ( word in mother tongue – 1 sec pause– English word). Listen to it many times. (The favourite of my wife!)
Make word lists (mother tongue – English), cover up the other side and say the words aloud or write them down before checking. (My favourite if followed by oral practice)
Make or have a look at a word list (mother tongue – English). Then make an exam for yourself or others.
Say or write a sentence where you use the new word.
Tell a story in your group where you use the new words. (Humour is the best medicine!)
Make two-sided word cards and use them in a game.
Learn words in groups (linked with a topic, nouns, adjectives etc.). Write them down in a grid or an excel file.
Use word formation technique. One word leads to a family of words.
Find synonyms or opposites for the word.
Make a gap exercise of the lyrics of a song.
Consult a dictionary (online or hard copy).
By doing various exercises (crossword puzzles, gap filling, hidden grid odd one out, etc.)
Guess the meaning of new words on the basis of the context.
Make use of free computer vocab exercises provided by publishers.
Give a definition of a word and your pair has to guess which it is (e.g. it is an adjective which means the same as ‘adequate’ – well ‘enough’ or ‘sufficient’)
Your say a word and your pair has to give a definition for it or explain it in another way (a vaccination – well, it is a shot given with a needle so that you do not get a disease)
Make use of the free vocab learning computer programmes in the internet.
When reading extra English materials such as magazines or books, take out your notebook and write down new words and phrases that you find interesting and useful.

N.B. I will give detailed advice what to when you ask your students to make exercises like the ones above. Here are the links Exercise types / Strategies 1 – 10 and Exercise types / Strategies 11 – 22

Let the students do a lot of vocab exercises orally. And – open up the vocab learning strategies, teach them how to write exercises of their own for themselves and others. Use free computer programmes. LEARNING BY DOING – WORKS HERE AS WELL!

Students learning new words by designing exercises

As you can see above many of the exercise types can be done orally and if the students move from word level to making sentences or stories of their own, we are beautifully applying CLT and differentiation principles. Instead of asking your students to do ready-made vocab exercises you can also teach them how to design vocab exercises for others.

As a result you, the teacher, do not have to come up with all the exercises if you notice workbook exercises do not work well. Start by going through the list of strategies little by little in your lessons and let the students then make the written exercises.

I don’t have the time, you say! Yes, you do. Leave out some of the workbook exercises and do these ones instead. The students enjoy these ones more than the workbook exercises. Or ask them to write the exercises at home and exchange them with each other in lessons. If you take copies of these student-produced exercises, you can use them in work stations, for example. Especially if you are rehearsing for an exam. It is simply a matter of organization.

There is no need to check all the tasks made by the students since learning takes place when they are writing the task. If there are problems, others will point them out. You, the teacher, just move about and offer help if needed. If needed, you can always take copies of the tasks or show them on the screen.

Students subconsciously learn the words they are working on while talking or writing vocab exercises. Why? Since they need to think a lot and make reasonable decisions.

Still, even if they never make any exercises themselves, knowledge of the vocab learning strategies will help them a lot.

The next article deals with what is meant by knowing a word and some other basic ideas on vocab learning
Then you will have a chance to practise identifying the strategies in real vocab exercises in my 3rd article.
In the following two articles I will demonstrate what you need to take into account when you make you students write vocabulary tasks themselves. (See the links above)

Reading

Strategies to be used before, during and after reading comprehension exams

30.10.2025 Raimo J Leave a comment

There is no hope of improving reading skills until the reasons for NOT UNDERSTANDING the text are identified by the students themselves and they commit themselves to overcome the problems.

It is essential for teachers to realize that the process of decoding someone else’s messages is not the same with everybody. We are all different and depending on our background and style of learning we process information differently. Our problems in reading may also vary drastically.

Just like listening, reading skill is hard to teach because we have no control of the process in the reader’s mind. Still, we can affect the process indirectly by giving advice and guidance. The general CLT principle which is in favour of a great amount of input resulting in good results needs to be supported by teaching strategies on how to prepare for reading comprehension exams and how we can learn from our mistakes in taking exams.

If you are teaching senior high students, I suggest you go through the whole process once with your students and then get feedback from them if it turned out to be worth the time spent on it.

Strategies are dealt with the students before an exam
You, the teacher, study how the returning of the exam is to be arranged
Arrange a student-centred lesson to return the exam
Show the students the ‘heureka’ type of comments to be used

Strategies / tips for students in a reading comprehension exam

Let’s have a look at some strategies that are useful when students take a reading comprehension exam. Some of them are actually the same as in listening exams. Still, learning to apply the strategies does not take place over night. It also requires some practice.

Throwing the students one text or exam after another and assuming that massive input will automatically improve reading skill does not necessarily lead to success with everybody. It is better to teach the students how they should approach an ordinary or an exam text.

Relax your body. Take a couple of deep breaths! It will calm your nerves. Being nervous won’t help you.
Read the whole text through at first but do not stop even if you do not understand the text perfectly. This way you will have a better idea about the topic and structure of the text.
If the logic of the text is good, you can easily spot the main ideas and sentences. The rest of the text is justifications of the arguments or examples.
Start working on the questions only if you read the whole text first. Many ideas open up if you know the exact topic and the perspective of the writer.
Once you understand the topic and the questions, you can guess many things they talk about. If you use common sense and your background knowledge on the topic you may find it helpful.
Read the questions carefully and focus only on them.
Most of the information in the text is not needed. It may be irrelevant.
Don’t panic if you see new words. Try to guess what they mean. Very often you need not know the meaning of new words at all.
Be aware and watch out for extreme words like ‘never’ ‘only’ ‘always’ ‘anyone’. They are often too strong.
Link ideas that have the same meaning. For example: If the idea in the text is expressed “He used to go fishing on Saturdays and Sundays.” the same idea is in the answer booklet as “He was in the habit of catching salmon and trout at weekends.”
So the most common technique is just to express the same idea in other words.
If your exam consists of multiple choice tasks, use elimination technique. For example: Choice A was not talked about at all, Choice B is wrong because they said ’everybody’ which is not true, Choice D is wrong because ‘chance’ means different from ‘change’… SO the right answer has to be Choice C. You have now eliminated the wrong answers and you will answer C (even if you may not know exactly why).

Strategic tips for the teacher about returning an exam

Have an exam for the students and when you return it devote a whole lesson to go through the exam in detail, every question and every alternative. I explain the process in detail in the next article.
Demonstrate with the first two questions how the analysis is done and then let the students discuss the other questions in groups. Have star students leading the discussion without lecturing the right answers. See my next article.
Don’t interfere with the group discussions but take notes on the problems the groups do not seem to solve well. Answer the students questions at the end of the lesson and point out your own observations.
Now the students should have a vague idea what the reasons for the mistakes are. In other words, they may have identified some of the problem areas.
Now that the students are motivated to hear more it is time to have another lesson where you go through my strategy tips for an exam. Show the tips one by one on the screen and let the students ask questions on them. Give the list as a handout after the discussion with my copyright. Let them have it even in exams.
If you think your class will not be able to discuss these matters in English, let them use the mother tongue to make sure the messages get through.
Make each student write in English what they have learnt over these two lessons and what they are planning to do to overcome the difficulties.
Show them my ‘heureka’ comments on the screen as models of the kind of comments you are looking for. See below!
Collect the comments and give feedback on them in the 3rd reading comprehension enhancement lesson.
Now you have done your job: you gave your students the tools for improvement. Nevertheless, they are the ones who have to start working. Probably making use of the other strategies that I have been talking about.

The students have to come up with ‘heureka’ realizations like …

Ah, I think I worry too much about words I have never seen and stop reading because of them and get frustrated. SO, next time I will try to guess the meanings or maybe the word is not important at all or knowing if the word has a positive or negative meaning on the basis of the context is enough.
Ah, ‘carry out’ and ‘realize’ can sometimes mean the same OR ‘no adequate funds’ is the same as ‘not enough money’ or ‘lack of sufficient resources’. SO, my problem is vocabulary and learning many ways to say the same thing.
Ah, I stumble over the same structures over and over again. Shortened sentences, never heard. Wow! ‘Having left for downtown’ is a shortened sentence meaning the same as ‘When I had started to drive towards the city center’ SO, I have to study grammar more because I always stop at this kind of structures and do not get the meaning.
Ah, my mistake is that I start reading by translating the text word by word. SO, I have to stop translation tactics because it is too slow. Working through mother tongue will not do. I have to learn to think in English.
Ah, I have been too much in a hurry. I usually start by reading Question 1 and then look at the text without knowing what the whole text is about. SO, from now on I will read the whole text through first without stopping even if I do not understand everything at first. This way I will get an overall picture of the topic and the main ideas.
Ah, I never realized that some sentences are more important in a paragraph than others. SO, spotting of the main sentences in a paragraph seems to work for me. I will worry about the details much less this way.
Oh, no. All these years I have been trying hard but nothing seems to work. I thought I was just stupid. Now that you told about dyslexia and its symtoms I think I may suffer from it. SO, Thanks. I will contact the special teacher and see if he can help me.

Having a talent rarely takes anyone to the top. Reaching excellence in anything requires very hard work, 10 000 hours of work, they say. Maybe that is the total number of hours needed to master a foreign language ‘perfectly’. I am still counting ...

Up to 10 percent of students suffer from some form of dyslexia, reading and writing difficulty. Luckily these days students have the courage to admit they have these problems and special teachers are trained to help them.

The text in the next article is an example of how a mature 16-year-old might be able to process a reading comprehension text. I believe that if the students are able to apply the strategies and tips given in my previous articles in this ‘test’ they will become better readers. And writers too since good writers will anticipate the reactions of their readers.

You will find the sample exam in the next article and correct answers with a ‘mature’ reader’s comments in the final article of this Reading Unit.

Communicative teaching (CLT), Grammar

THE DODSON BILINGUAL METHOD

30.10.2025 Raimo J Leave a comment

Is there a method that allows the teacher to use the mother tongue in teaching English without feeling guilty? Yes, there is. The Dodson bilingual method.

The only time when I have been using the Dodson bilingual method in teaching languages was in the mid-1980s when I taught Swedish to complete beginners. The method itself was developed by Professor J. Dodson, a Welshman, and even if it was not widely used and accepted I think it is worth introducing here. For slow learners this method is excellent in getting them to use the new language from the very beginning.

The Dodson method is sometimes linked with the oldfashioned translation method but that is unfair because the students do not actually do a translation but they learn the phrases by heart after repeating them after the teacher and making changes in the phrases. It is actually very close to the lexical approach.

The time phrases in Example 1 below may seem simple and even childish but if you could do these exercises in Japanese, Arabic or Persian, would you not be proud of yourself! A lot of input and repetition at the right level with the help the mother tongue helps the students tremendously.

Example 1, learning to tell the time: It’s eleven o’clock. / It ‘s two thirty / It’s fifteen past four / It’s twenty to ten (4 basic phrases visible on the screen)

Stage 1: Pre-task: BINGO numbers 1 – 30

Stage 2: The students read the 4 basic phrases above aloud after the teacher who gives the meaning in the mother tongue.

Stage 3: Then the teacher says one of the same phrases in the mother tongue BUT changes one or two underlined words in it and the class says the phrase in English in chorus. I’ll repeat: The teacher uses the mother tongue but the students don’t!

Model visible: It’s eleven o’clock. Teacher says the phrase in the mother tongue: Kello on 10. Kello on 7. Kello on 12.	*Students say in English in chorus:* It’s ten o’clock. It’s seven o’clock. It’s twelve o’clock.
Model: It’s two thirty. Kello on 5.30. Kello on 10.30. … etc.	It’s five thirty. It’s ten thirty.
Model: It’s fifteen past four. Kello on 13 yli 7. Kello on 25 yli 3. … etc.	It’s thirteen past seven. It’s twenty-five past three.
Model: It’s twenty to ten. Kello on 5 vaille 8. Kello on 25 vaille 11. … etc.	It’s five to eight. It’s twenty-five to eleven.
*Finally all four patterns in a random order* Kello on 10 vaille 7. Kello on 6. Kello on 11.30. Kello on 7 yli 9.	It’s ten to seven. It’s six o’clock. It’s eleven thirty. It’s seven past nine.

Stage 4: The students work in pairs either doing what the teacher just did or writing times on a paper and the pair responds to it.

The next stage would, of course, be going through additional time phrases such as It’s eleven o’clock. /It ‘s two thirty = It’s half past two / It’s fifteen to four = It’s a quarter to four etc.

The main points in me using Dodson’s method ran as follows:

Decide if you need to have a pre-task to do some revision (numbers, days of the week, months, verbs, adjectives etc.)
Choose the key phrases you want to teach in advance, decide which word(s) you wish to change and write down the other words you wish to use in the phrases.
The Dodson method is rather hectic for the teacher who has to bang in the mother tongue phrases rather quickly.
Short utterances and sentences serve as units of teaching.
Grammar is not emphasized and structures are learnt as lexical items, pretty much like in the lexical approach.
Natural situations and dialogues in them serve as a starting point and then we proceed the narrative texts on the same topic.

Example 2: A situation in a shop.

Stage 1: The whole dialogue and all options are repeated aloud after the teacher.

Stage 2: The teacher says the phrases in the mother tongue and the students say them in English, about 40 phrases. In a good class you can skip this stage.

A: Good morning /afternoon. I’m looking for a silver ring / a colour TV / a blanket / jeans / running shoes. How much is it / are they?

B: Well, it depends on the size and quality. 50 dollars / 600 euros / 45 pounds / 38 dollars the cheapest ones / 80 pounds for the best ones.

A: Ah, this one looks/ these ones look very nice / beautiful / very warm / modern / wonderful.

B: Yes, you are right. It comes from Britain / India / China / from a nearby factory / from abroad.

A: Fine. I’ll take this one / these ones / the black model.

B: Okey, how do you want to pay? 50 dollars / 600 euros / 45 pounds / 38 dollars / 80 pounds. In cash or by credit card?

A: In cash, here’s the money / By credit card. Here you are.

B: Thank you sir / madam. And welcome back again.

Stage 3: The students read the dialogue in pairs picking up any green items they want or replace them with their own words and ideas ( = the last idea is the simple automatic way to differentiate the learning situation)

Stage 4: The students work in pairs and write a similar dialogue but make a lot of changes in it and the dialogues are later on circulating in the class and read by the others.

There is not much ready-made material like this available but in some classes this technique may be worth the extra trouble it causes in planning. My memories from these classes are still pleasant and the response from students was very favourable.

Communicative teaching (CLT), Historical perspectives

The Dodson bilingual method

17.11.2021 Raimo J Leave a comment

Is there a method that allows the teacher to use the mother tongue in teaching English without feeling guilty? Yes, there is. The Dodson bilingual method

Slow learners and beginners share one disadvantage: they do not understand the exact meanings of sentences unless they are explained in the mother tongue. Most teachers probably try to speak as much English as they can but sometimes they have no other choice than resort to their mother tongue. Still, if the Dodson method is used even the weakest students will learn a lot of phrases by heart and will be able to communicate in the target language at least in a satisfactory level.

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