The dictation

Abstract

This article reports a study about a school practice: dictation. It is widely found in everyday teaching practices, in teaching materials and teaching guidelines in continuing education. The aim of the study was to understand this usual and persistent school practice. Its spread and high frequency of occurrence legitimize its existence, so that, along with many other school practices, it survives without questioning. The development of this study involved, in its methodological design, some principles of Oral History on how to interview participants, as well as a search, on the Internet, for instructional texts and free posts that make reference to dictation. The theoretical references came from Bakhtin, Certeau and Foucault. Results show that dictation can be considered a teaching device, which manifests both an explicit materiality (the activity itself) and various different lines that would show themselves as obedience, escape, capitalization and many others. Only the teacher and his/her students would be able to convert this device in order to suppress what does not help them, because practitioners can invent new meanings to something deliberately produced to control them.

Keywords: dictation, device, teaching technique.