If you’ve ever taught exam preparation classes, I am sure you’ve already got quite a good collection of activities that have worked well with your students. However, the part of the exam I have always struggled with when it came to preparation was speaking. At the end of the day, it should be a natural skill. If people can speak in their mother tongue, they should be able to easily transfer some of their skills in L1 to successfully communicate in their L2. Unfortunately, that’s not what usually happens to our students.

The typical speaking activities when preparing students for their exam involve learning and practising useful expressions and correcting any mistakes our student make hoping that they will learn from the feedback and won’t ever repeat those same mistakes. Such an attitude to exam preparation may result rather boring and depressing for our students. What is more, students only focus on their failures and do not learn how to communicate outside of the exam situation.

In order to help my students better speak, communicate with the outer world and eventually get better marks for their speaking, I have started experimenting with dogme, also known as “an unplugged approach”.

What is dogme and how can I apply it to help my students?

Dogme is a teaching approach which is conversation driven, materials-light and focuses on emergent language (Meddings & Thornbury, 2009). This means that instead of bringing tons of materials to your exam preparation lessons, you start a conversation with a sentence or a topic and let your students lead you throughout the lesson. The teacher’s task is to monitor closely and help students maintain the conversation. If you notice that students keep making a mistake you can either focus on that language point or you can take notes and prepare the following lesson based on the mistakes you have corrected during the lesson.

Some of you might worry that this way you will not cover all the language points necessary for the exam. But it’s not true. Cambridge exams have a series of established topics that they expect students to be ready to talk about. It’s as easy as picking up one of these topics, writing a sentence about it on the board and letting your students discuss it. The sceptics now might say that students will lack some vocabulary and expressions and can’t do much without proper scaffolding, but similarly to the test-teach-test approach, students can ask the teacher for any vocabulary they need as the teacher’s role is more of a mediator rather than a provider. This way, they will remember the new vocabulary and phrases better as they will really be interested in knowing and using them. What is more, applying the dogme approach will help your students with Part 4 of the speaking exam in which they have to speak freely about the topic related to the previous tasks.

Let’s have a look at a practical example. One of the official topics is Travel and Transport. You can ask your students to divide their sheet of paper into four sections. Then you can ask them to write at the top of each box: memories, opinions, associations and picture. The first time you do it, you may have to explain what “association” means. In the next step, ask your students to complete at least one of the boxes. Tell them they can write whatever they want related to the topic of travel and transport. (if they have no idea what to write, they can just draw a picture in the final box), e.g.

When your students are ready, ask them to explain to their partner what they have written (or drawn) in each of the boxes and why. When the students are ready, ask them about their diagrams and ask any follow-up questions that you can think of. Correct the mistakes on the spot and expand on the language your students used in class, e.g. if you see they struggle with past forms, you can quickly go over the past tenses. Believe it or not, with a table like the one above you can have your students speaking for an entire lesson!

In my experience, using dogme for exam preparation classes keeps students motivated and engaged. The students usually appreciated the possibility to contribute to the lesson and everyone participates and expresses their opinions, even the shy students! Using dogme also helps you as a teacher to develop spontaneous and responsive teaching competencies by writing all of the students’ ideas and answers, and correcting on-the-spot as well as using delayed feedback. Finally, using dogme fosters learner autonomy by giving students more control over the flow of the lesson.

Give it a try and definitely let me know in the comments whether it has worked with your students!

Read more about dogme here:

• Christensen, T. (2005). Dogme in language teaching in Japan. The Language Teacher, 29/01, 15-18.
• Meddings, L., & Thornbury, S. (2009). Teaching Unplugged. Surrey: Delta Publishing.
• Rebuffet-Broadus, C., & Wright, J. (2018, 07 08). Experimental Practice in ELT: A walk on the wild side. The Round.
• Thornbury, S. (2000). A Dogma for EFL. IATEFL Issues, 153, 2.
• Thornbury, S. (2005). Dogme: Dancing in the dark? Folio 9/2, 3-5.
• Thornbury, S. (2013). Dogme: hype, evolution or intelligent design? The Language Teacher, 37-39.