An Introduction to Dogme

Last week, I led an insett at the British Council, Bilbao on Dogme.  We discussed dogme principles (see Scott Thornbury’s article ‘A Dogma for EFL' for more information) by contrasting them with a coursebook orientated approach and deciding which we agreed with more (thanks to Lee MacKenzie for this strategy).

We looked at some ideas from ‘Teaching Unplugged’ by Meddings & Thornbury (Delta Publishing, 2009) and a few I picked up from different sites on the net, of which I particularly recommend:

 - the Dogme Cookbook    

 - Dale Coulter’s Language Moments

 - Mike Harrison’s site

 Luke Meddings delivering a live lesson is also very useful to get a better idea of what a dogme lesson consists of.

At the end of the session we carried out a little survey. While only one of the teachers present felt they would like to adopt a completely dogme approach, everyone felt they would like to incorporate some of the approach into their teaching. But, as a colleague pointed out, they probably wouldn’t have come to the session if they hadn’t.