A Strange Tale

Activity type: This is a fun story telling/dictation activity in which students have to deduce what happened at the end of the story.
Level: Intermediate and above
Aim: To motivate students to read

Teacher's notes:

Put the students into groups of three.
Ask them to think of something strange that has happened to them; this could be anything from a strange travel story, a chance meeting with someone, a weird coincidence etc. Tell them to tell their groups. If you need to encourage them, tell them something strange or funny which has happened to you.
After they have done this, ask the students to tell the whole group their stories. If you have a large group, just pick out a few stories that you heard. Do a little delayed error correction with the students, possibly by dictating some incorrect sentences that you heard the students say during the story telling phase. Tell the students to write down the incorrect sentences and then ask them to correct them.
After this, tell the students that they are going to read a strange story about a taxi/cab journey. The way that they are going to read this is by doing a running dictation. This involves the students being put into groups of threes or pairs depending on the size of the class. Appoint one student a scribe (writer) and the other students the ‘runners.’ Stick the strips of the story on the wall of the classroom or even outside the classroom in the corridor. Tell the runners to run to the strips, read them one at a time, memorize them and then race back to the writer. They should tell the writers word for word what was on the strip and then run back out again to memorize another strip. NOTE: the students are not allowed to remove the strips from the wall; they must simply read and remember. Once they have finished they should sit down. NOTE: this is a great activity for younger learners and adults. It was first showed to me in Poland but I have found many examples of this activity in books on dictation and course books.
Once the students have written down the sentences from the strips, they should try to put the story in order.
Go over the story with the whole group and ask them the final question i.e. how did he know? Answer: The man must have told him his destination before he got into the cab because the cab driver started to drive. If he were deaf, he wouldn’t have been able to.

Note: You may want to pre-teach a few words from the story: incessantly, hearing impaired and traffic jam.

STORY

Yesterday, a man jumped into the back of a cab because he needed to get

home; he was late and he wanted to get home quickly.

Unfortunately the traffic was terrible and he got held up in a traffic jam.

Minutes ticked by, luckily he loved to talk and so sat in the back of the cab talking.

Unfortunately, he talked incessantly and the cab driver soon got tired

of him.

The cab driver looked into his mirror and said, “Sorry I can’t hear you; I

am hearing impaired.”

The passenger carried on talking anyway because he knew that the driver could hear

perfectly.