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Teacher’s notes English

dictionary

ability /E"bIlEti/ noun HHH

Level – Upper Intermediate – Adanced

Suggestions for use in the classroom

This dictation is appropriate for classes at Upper Intermediate level or above. Although the dictation is
only about 1 minute long, the ideas below will need about one hour of class time if you use them all!

1 Lead-in
You can prepare the students for the dictation by using one of the following activities:

Write the following chart on the board:

Name: Oscar Pistorius
Nickname: The Blade . . .
Holds world records in: . . .
Disability: Was born with congenital disease, had . . . amputated
Ambition: to compete in the . . .

Play learners the dictation (or read it to them) and ask them to listen out for the missing information.
Then tell them to compare with a partner. This is also the time for you to pre-teach / check some of the
more difficult vocabulary (e.g. congenital disease, amputated).

Write the following words on the board and ask the students to make a phrase out of them:

fastest    no    on    man    legs    the

Check back with the class, then play the first sentence of the dictation. When students have finished,
write the following phrases on the board and clarify what they mean.

congenital disease carbon-fibre artificial legs world-record holder

able-bodied athletes allowed to qualify Olympics

Ask students to speculate what the rest of the dictation is about.

2 The dictation
It is usually best for students to listen to the complete text at least once without stopping before they are asked
to take notes. When they listen again, you will need to pause from time to time to allow students to write.
The script has suggested pause marks. One of the values of dictations is to train students’ short-term memory,
so the sections between pauses should be short enough for the exercise to be do-able, but long enough to be
challenging.
You can use one of the suggestions below to vary this procedure.

Play the dictation once. Then give a stronger student a copy of the tapescript and ask him / her to read it
aloud for the rest of the class. The other students can call out STOP when they want the dictator to stop.

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Teacher’s notes English

dictionary

Make one copy of the tapescript for every four students. Cut up the tapescript so that each student gets
a paragraph. Tell them to dictate their paragraphs to each other so that by the end, each student has
written down the three other paragraphs. They must then decide together on the correct order of the
final text. To finish the dictation, play the whole text through.

3 Follow-up
You can use one or all of the exercises below to explore the language in the dictation.

A Get it right – ability

Ask students to turn the dictation over and reconstruct the following sentence from memory.
His trainers / say / Pistorius / has / ability / run / against / able-bodied / athletes.
When they have finished, ask them to check against the original. At this point you could direct them
to the Get it right box in the dictionary to look at some typical mistakes made with the word ability.
Alternatively, you could read / teach students this information using the board to illustrate the
examples.
To consolidate, ask students to do the exercise related to this Get it right box on the CD-ROM (again, if
they don’t have it, you could do this as a worksheet, or on the board).

B Expand your vocabulary – run

Ask students to think of as many different verbs of movement as they can to complete this sentence:
Oscar Pistorius __________ on two carbon-fibre artificial legs.
Get some feedback. If the students haven’t come up with many words, suggest the following, by giving
them the first letter or letters.
To run quickly: to d____, to r_____, to spr____
To run fairly slowly: to j____, to tr____
To walk slowly: to str____, to am_____
To walk quickly: to str____
Tell students to look at the Expand your Vocabulary pages EV22 and EV24 for different ways of saying
RUN and WALK.

C Avoiding offense – talking about disabilities

Ask students to look at the last sentence. What does Pistorius say about disability? Explain the use
of the word disabled (see the Words that avoid giving offense box under the entry for disabled) and the
negative connotation of the word handicapped. Ask students to use the dictionary to find different
ways of describing the following:

a person who can’t see

a person who can’t hear
a person who can’t walk

As a follow up, you could ask students to form grammatically correct and logical sentences using
different terms.

This page has been downloaded from www.macmillandictionaries.com.

It is photocopiable, but all copies must be complete pages. Copyright © Macmillan Publishers Limited 2008.