Was this a DOGME lesson?

This was an experimental lesson from my point of view. The ideas of Dogme, references to which can be found linked under Methodologies in the Methodology wiki, are quite consistent with some of my views on language and language learning. So I deliberately went into the lesson with no material and no fixed plan. Now, that is a slight exaggeration - I did have a text in my bag that I would have used if necessary, and I did know that I wanted to talk to the class and elicit information, in the form of words, from them. And talk to them - relate personal anecdotes that I would make them understand with whatever resources I had available.

But knowing that they wouldn't have the language to say what they wanted, I was prepared to supply it. At times when we weren't all working together in a circle of 6 + me, they opened their dictionaries and found the English equivalents of what they wanted to say, sometimes fidning the wrong "equivalent" that their rather poor dictionaries provide them with. They and I were constantly jumping up to write things on the board which led to a completely full board of words and phrases, some of which were language learning items like I mixed them up. We did some pron on them and at the very end I prioritized them, eg giving at last, at least, about (asi), recently #1, Have you ever ....? #2 pregant #3. etc. So there were plenty of vocab items with each number. I would have let them prioitize them if we weren't out of time; perhaps the first time it's enough for them to observe the process.

Another feature of the lesson was a repeated emphasis on communicative answers, not grammatically correct answers, which are quite often vacuous and infrequent in real language. When, for example, would you answer the question, Do you like German? with Yes, I do. ? Rather, they answered this question and others like it with, It's wonderful, it's OK, not much, I can't stand it.

Another feature was a series of Have you ever ... questions which we toyed with together and then they wrote a few of their own, asked each other, discussed, wrote each other's questions from memory etc. ... all of this without their knowing irregular verbs - pretty important for present perfect. Well, Marie had a page of irregular verbs open in her lap and there's a wall chart with irregular verbs and I was never far away.

It may seem iconoclastic teaching B without having taught A, but as we read in the Lexical Syllabus recently, and a recurring theme in much language teaching literature including Dogme, language learning takes place when students are engaged in real language exchange - this is as true as for FLA as for SLA; atomised syllabi are nice and tidy but require artificially constructed input to meet the needs of the discrete items.

Comments

* This was not an easy lesson - I'd even say it exhausted them. They were concentrating like crazy when trying to understand something and then they'd sigh and relax once they got it. There was much mirth and merriment during the lesson.
* I wouldn't be surprised if they were at times thinking: when is he going to stop pumping the small talk and start the lesson? Or maybe they wondered if I had decided to abandon my lesson and just continue with words and phrases and grammar and communicative language and pronunciation and learning to learng techniques etc. ?So now I wonder how long small talk could be pumped like that. Lesson after lesson? Or would their faith-in-teacher deteriorate? And would it have worked with 10 or 12 sts instead of 6? It can of course be somewhat more contrived - the teacher could "just happen to mention" an amazing dream he'd had recently, which would require a lot of simple past and past continuous. And the topic of the dream would be rich in vocab. So while it might appear impromptu deriving from one's real-world, pre-determined teaching objectives would certainly be in place. But it would still be a lesson without pre-set structure or any physical resources.
* From my point of view, it felt pretty weird going into a lesson without any handouts, CDs, computer etc. Four whiteboard pens and a duster was the total sum of my equipment. Equipment was a new word early in the lesson, by the way.

Your comments are welcome here.