All the king's men (dictation)

I went out into the street, where the dogs lay on the shady side under the corrugated iron awnings, and walked down the block till I came to the harness shop. There was one vacant seat out front, so I said how-do-you-do, and joined the club. I was the junior member by forty years, but I thought I was going to have liver spots on my swollen old hands crooked on the head of the hickory stick like the rest of them before anybody was going to say anything. In a town like Mason City the bench in front of the harness shop is – or was twenty years ago before the concrete slab got laid down – the place where Time gets tangled in its own feet and lies down like an old hound and gives up the struggle. It is a place where you sit down and wait for night to come and arteriosclerosis. It is the place the local undertaker looks at with confidence and thinks he is not going to starve as long as that much work is cut out for him. But if you are sitting on the bench in the middle of the afternoon in late August with the old ones, it does not seem that anything will ever come, not even your own funeral, and the sun beats down and the shadows don’t move across the bright dust, which, if you stare at it long enough, seems to be full of glittering specks, like quartz. The old ones sit there with their liver-spotted hands crooked on the hickory sticks, and they emit a kind of metaphysical effluvium by virtue of which your categories are altered.

 Time and motion cease to be. It is like sniffing ether, and everything is sweet and sad and far away. You sit there among the elder gods, disturbed by no sound except the slight spasmodic breathing of the one who has asthma, and wait for them to lean from the Olympian and sunlit detachment and comment, with their unenvious and foreknowing irony, on the goings-on of the folks who are still snared in the toils of mortal compulsions.

The Oil-bearing Rose - Symbol of Bulgaria

Dictation       

        The rose has always been valued for its beauty and is an ancient symbols of love, affection and romance. According to legend, Diana, the goddess of hunt, women-mothers and moon, had a priestess, Rosalia by name.Rosalia decided to marry the beautiful Semedor and leave the goddess. At the very moment while the two lovers were taking the oath of allegiance, Diana, furious about the infidelity of her priestess, pierced Rosalia’s heart with an arrow and turned her into a thorny bush covered with white fragrant flowers. Later, the running Venice chased by Mars pricked herself onto the little thorns of the bush and her blood coloured the roses in red.
       According to another story,  the ancient Hellenes associated the background of roses with the descent of Aphrodite – the most beautiful among women, born from the sea waves foam. Along with her body the enraged sea washed ashore some rose shrubs, covered with white blossoms. They filled the air with a gentle fragrance, making it more pleasant for the goddess of love and beauty.
       The Valley of Roses in Bulgaria is majestic and breathtaking. It has always been the centre stage for the colorful age-old Festival of Roses. This traditional festival is a symbol of the rose industry and its influence on the culture, spirit and lifestyle of the region. It is not known when exactly and in what way the oil-bearing rose was brought to the Bulgarian lands but Bulgaria has gained an international popularity becoming a world factor in the rose-growing industry.

Globalization

Dictation - Upper-intermediate/ Advanced

         The backlash against globalization is a broad phenomenon that is fed by many different specific emotions and anxieties. This backlash expresses itself in different forms, through different characters in different countries. This is not surprising. Markets generate both capital and chaos; the more powerful markets become as a result of globalization, the more widespread and diverse their disruptions.
         Beyond this general sense of disruption and dislocation, the opponents of globalization resent it because they feel that as their countries have plugged in the globalization system, they have been forced into a golden cage. Some don't like the golden cage because they feel economically pinched by it. Some worry that they don't have the knowledge, skills or resources to enlarge the cage and ever really get the gold out of it. Some don't like it because they resent the widening income gaps that the cage produces or the way it squeezes jobs from higher-wage countries to lower-wage ones.
         Some don't like it because it seems to put a higher priority on laws to promote free trade than it does on laws to protect turtles and dolphins, water and trees. Some don't like it because they feel they have no say in its design or that getting their countries up to the standards is just too hard.

Decaying housing estates

Dictation - upper-intermediate/advanced

         Housing estates with crumbling walls, leaking roofs and broken windows are a common occurrence in the country. Some lie empty. Others are inhabited, as indicated by their façades decorated with satellite TV dishes and colourful arrays of washing.
The empty buildings are the remains of state housing projects built for employees of factories and the families of officers in military bases. When the factories and the bases shut down, the people left. Some of the blocks of flats remain empty to this day.
        Others, however, attracted destitute and homeless families, usually Gypsies. Some of the derelict apartment blocks are, theoretically, municipal property rented to poor citizens. The majority were built for the Gypsies, who were forced to settle after the 1960s. Suffering from high unemployment rates after 1989, most of the inhabitants were unable to pay their utility bills and token rent. Most city councils ignored the problem for years. The results are ghettos where poverty, crime and ethnic tensions are the norm.
      There is another type of decaying houses, which you notice because of their elaborate turn-of-the-19th Century façade. Such buildings are usually monuments of culture, and their piteous condition is entirely intentional. As a matter of course, their owners want them demolished and replaced by some flashy new business centre, yet another shopping mall, or block of flats. The only way to achieve this is to leave the building exposed to the elements and hope it collapses. To rephrase Stalin: no monument of culture, no problem. 

Why use dictations in class

          Using dictations as a language learning device has been neglected in our country in recent years. Though a lot of teachers and students consider dictations dull, time-consuming, non-communicative and pointless, I believe that, when not used too often, they can be beneficial for the students.  
         What are some of the advantages of dictations: they improve listening skills and the ability to distinguish sounds; improve spelling and raise grammatical awareness; improve the ability to guess words from context; improve concentration and develop short-term memory; involve all students in the class and prevent bad discipline; get students acquainted with interesting texts.

For more detailed information on the benefits and the different types of dictations, check this site: http://www.matefl.org/page95.php

The Solar Backpack

        Dictation - intermediate/ upper intermediate

        The solar backpack is typically a cloth sack that is portable enough to be carried on the back or over the shoulders of the individual.  It is normally equipped with a flexible solar panel, batteries, cords, plugs, light bulbs, and charge controller.  The mechanism allows for the conversion of sunlight into usable electricity to provide power to common portable electronic appliances and devices. It usually delivers power that can last for up to 120 watt-hours per day. 

        The solar powered backpack has evolved from a supreme idea of charging smaller electrical devices from the sun energy. Therefore their first benefit is that it helps you to make your life easier, simpler and more comfortable. Moreover, solar power is free of charge, so you will not have any running costs, while using your backpack to charge other devices. Also you should not forget that it is a backpack, therefore you may take it with you anywhere you want. Its size and weight are specifically adjusted for relocation purposes.  The solar powered backpacks usually come with a whole set of different cell-phone adapters and USB plugs, therefore you shall not worry, almost all of your devices can be charged with the help of this miracle of high-tech-innovation.

       This device is easy to operate, safe to use, convenient to take and fashionable. It is an ideal product for living and traveling. There are many practical applications that can make it extremely functional like in the case of field research, international aid, emergency power, or disaster relief among others.

Sand

(Dictation - upper-intermediate/ advanced)       

         Among the many thousands of things that I have never been able to understand, one in particular stands out. That is the question of who was the first person who stood by a pile of sand and said, ‘You know, I bet if we took some of this and mixed it with a little potash and heated it, we could make a material that would be solid and yet transparent. We could call it glass.’ Call me obtuse, but you could stand me on a beach till the end of time and never would it occur to me to try to make it into windows.

         Much as I admire sand’s miraculous ability to be transformed into useful objects like glass and concrete, I am not a great fan of it in its natural state. To me, it is primarily a hostile barrier that stands between a car park and water. It blows in your face, gets in your sandwiches, swallows vital objects like car keys and coins. In hot countries, it burns your feet and makes you squeal and hop to the water in a fashion that people with better bodies find amusing. When you are wet, it adheres to you like stucco, and cannot be shifted with a fireman’s hose. But – and here’s the strange thing – the moment you step on a beach towel, climb into a car or walk across a recently vacuumed carpet it all falls off.

        For days afterwards, you tip astounding, mysteriously undiminishing piles of it onto the floor every time you take off your shoes, and spray the vicinity with quantities more when you peel off your socks. Sand stays with you for longer than many contagious diseases. And dogs use it as a lavatory. No, you may keep sand as far as I am concerned.

After Bill Bryson "Notes from a small island" 

The Great Stone Face

(Dictation - advanced)

     Embosomed amongst a family of lofty mountains, there was a valley so spacious that it contained many thousand inhabitants. Some of these good people dwelt in long-huts, with the black forest all around them, on the steep and difficult hill-sides. Others had their homes in comfortable farm-houses, and cultivated the rich soil on the gentle slopes or level surfaces of the valley. Others, again, were congregated into populous villages, where some wild, highland rivulet, tumbling down from its birthplace in the upper mountain region, had been caught and tamed by human cunning, and compelled to turn the machinery of cotton factories. The inhabitants of this valley, in short, were numerous, and of many modes of life. But all of them, grown people and children, had a kind of familiarity with the Great Stone Face, although some possessed the gift of distinguishing this natural phenomenon more perfectly than many of their neighbours.

     The Great Stone Face, then, was a work of Nature in her mood of majestic playfulness, formed on a perpendicular side of a mountain by some immense rocks, which had been thrown together in such a position as, when viewed at a proper distance, precisely to resemble the features of the human countenance. It seemed as if an enormous giant, or Titan, had sculptured his own likeness on the precipice. There was the broad arch of the forehead, a hundred feet in height; the nose, with its long bridge; and the vast lips, which, if they could have spoken, would have rolled their thunder accents from one end of the valley to the other. True it is, that if the spectator approached too near, he lost the outlines of the gigantic visage, and could discern only a heap of ponderous and gigantic rocks, piled in chaotic ruin one upon another.  

After Nathaniel Hawthorne 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Hawthorne

A dictation featuring - ie- and -ei-

A lot of students have problems spelling words which contain the diphthongs -ie- and -ei-. Of course they should all remember the rhyme

i before e,

Except after c,

Or when sounded as "a,"

As in neighbour and weigh.

Here's a dictation to do with your upper-intermediate or advanced students.

        On entering the hall Adam at once perceived that grief and melancholy reigned supreme in their house. Still struggling with his impressions he allowed himself to be relieved of his hat and coat and in silence followed the servant up the shallow stairs.       
        Mary received him in her father’s study. She wasn’t alone. She introduced him to her niece, a tall girl of eighteen with piercing eyes and her uncle, a fierce-looking priest in his late forties. After the brief introduction Mary began speaking of what had happened in tones so absolutely foreign to her that Adam started. In fact, the truth was worse than he had conceived. It was maddening. He believed he might have yielded to despair, had he known it all at the time.
       Suddenly his joy in himself and his achievements dropped from him. He didn’t feign indifference but allowed his voice to tremble with emotion as he stretched his hand out and spoke in a hoarse whisper. The chief difficulty was that he had to find an excuse for his long silence. After what he thought was a plausible explanation Adam uttered a sigh of relief and relit his cigar, which had gone out while he was speaking. He passed his handkerchief across his forehead. Of course, Adam’s explanation had not deceived even himself. Mary asked the priest to explain to Adam what mischief had been done to the family and that much of their property would be ceased for payment of debts.
        It was the price they had to pay for his thoughtlessness and carelessness. For some time everybody was silent. The girl kept examining the room, the ceiling, the walls, each piece of furniture, then Adam. Looking into her eyes, Adam for a moment forgot where he was. The shriek of the brakes from outside brought him back to reality. The lawyer had come.