Revisiting Dictations - Embedding Purposeful Communication

I am not a fan of dictations. I find them boring, and while I understand how they can aid in both the acquisition of language and the creation of orthographic mapping in students' minds, my students really do not like them. One student told me, "This is like taking notes!"

I am currently reading Common Ground: Second Language Acquisition Theory Goes to the Classroom by Maris Hawkins and Florencia Henshaw. In the first chapter, Hawkins and Henshaw discuss how to transform traditional activities into ones which reflect a communicative aspect; among these, they discuss a dictation. This can be found on pages 17-18 (according to my Kindle, so the pages may be different in a hard copy).

I tried out this modified dictation today in my Latin 1 classes, and I really like how it went. I did make some changes to how they present it in their book, but the spirit is still the same. I TAKE NO CREDIT FOR THE FOLLOWING - THIS IS ALL HAWKINS AND HENSHAW!

As is the example in the book, the focus of my dictation was on introducing the phrase "I like" (in Latin, mihi placet - literally "it pleases me").

1. I looked online to find the top six ranked activities which American teenagers like to do. I used Gemini AI to help find the ranked activities (so take with a grain of salt the accuracy), but according to a 2025 Pew Report as found by AI, the top six activities in order are:
1. watching digital content (Disney +, Hulu, Netflix, etc)
2. being on social media (Tik Tok, Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, etc)
3. listening to music
4. playing video games
5. sleeping
6. playing sports
2. I then scrambled the order and wrote them up as dictation sentences in Latin with the phrase "mihi placet....". There were a number of words and phrases for which I had to establish meaning in English and Latin: social media, video games, to watch digital content. 
3. From here, I treated this as a regular dictation activity.
4. Once the dictation activity was done, I then asked students to rank these activities from 1-6 according to THEIR preference.
5. Then I asked them to rank these activities according to how they thought AMERICAN TEENAGERS had answered.
6. I then projected a slide, revealing the Pew Report answers in Latin one at a time, starting with #6. 

Observations

1. While it still was a traditional dictation in a way, I loved the purposeful communication aspect of it at the end. Students were learning about themselves and their interests compared to how they "ranked" on a national poll.
2. I felt that having students rank their interests at the end according to their preferences and then predict what American teenagers said gave a sense of anticipation when I revealed the rankings - it felt like a game show! 
3. As a teacher, I definitely felt more engaged in the activity, since I knew where the dictation was heading. Most times, I end up zoning out... 
4. In Latin, much like Spanish, the phrase "I like" is usually followed by an infinitive. I had not yet introduced the infinitive form, but because I had sheltered vocabulary last semester, students already knew the verb forms for hear/listen to, play, and sleep. So while I still established meaning for the infinitive forms during the dictation, I was able to do lots of quick pop-up grammar during it by saying, "You already know that ludit means 'plays' - ludere means 'to play' - the -re is where I am getting the 'to __________." Using the phrase "I like" seems like a natural way to introduce the infinitive of known verbs.

I would love to do more purposefully communicative dictations in the future - what are some suggestions which you all have?

Thank you, Maris Hawkins and Florencia Henshaw!