I demonstrated this activity a couple of weeks ago at TESOL-Spain in Lleida. It’s very similar to a standard picture dictation.

During a standard picture dictation, the teacher describes an image to the students who then attempt to draw it based on the teacher’s description. During the description, the teacher will probably be looking at the image but, of course, it is essential that the students can’t see it. For this reason, books work perfectly for this type of activity. Imagine the teacher standing at the front of the class holding a book open so that the students can only see the front and back covers.

Anyway, the difference between a standard picture dictation and a mental image dictation is that the latter doesn’t involve students drawing.

At TESOL-Spain, I used a newspaper article rather than a book. Here is how I described the image:

“I’m looking at a picture of a little boy. He’s standing alone in the street. In the foreground we can see a vertical yellow pole - a lamppost perhaps. In the background, just behind the lamppost, there is something that looks like it could be a rickshaw. It’s difficult to say because we can only see the back end of it. [At this stage I asked participants if they could guess where the picture was taken.]
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Actually, the term ‘little boy’ is probably a bit misleading. He’s just a toddler. [I asked participants how old toddlers are - concept checking!] I would say that the little boy is probably no more than two years old. He’s got rosy cheeks and he’s dressed for the cold. He’s wearing a lot of layers on top including a colourful woolly cardigan and a woolly hat. [At this stage I asked participants to guess when the picture was taken.]
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The photographer has taken this photograph at the toddler’s level. He must have crouched down for the shot. [I demonstrated crouching down.] It is difficult to say how the toddler feels about being photographed - he is looking directly at the camera but he looks a bit tentative, both in body language and facial expression.
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There are at least five other people in the picture - all adults - but because of the camera angle, we can only see the faces of those in the background. They seem to be looking at the toddler with concern.” [At this stage I asked participants to guess why the onlookers seem concerned. This was a good opportunity for yes/no questions.]
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The picture made the headlines in February this year and the story can be seen here. The secret to this activity is to prepare a description of an image but to withhold one vital fact that lies at its heart. So in the above case, I didn’t mention that Jingdan was chained to the lamppost (out of “misplaced love and fear” according to the Guardian article). Students’ task is then to ask you yes and no questions to work out what is happening and fill in the gaps in their minds.
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Another good type of image to use is a picture in which the protagonist is an animal doing a human activity. The front cover of my book, for example, shows a young Chinese photographer called Ming taking a photograph of his friend Mike at London zoo in 1939.
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You don’t have to buy the book to see the activity as it is accessible through Amazon’s ‘Look Inside’ function (click here).
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There is one more example of a mental image dictation in part 1 of the my Onestopenglish art series. It uses this painting by Marc Chagall:
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I love this painting and I like the way that a description of it creates an impossible image in the listener’s mind. Here is the description that I prepared that appears in the Onestopenglish article (thanks to Kerstin for letting me include it here).
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“There are two people in this painting - a man and a woman. They are in a room in a house. It could be a bedroom or it could be a sitting room. It has a red carpet and a chalk-white wall. The man is wearing black trousers and a green jumper. The woman is wearing a black dress and she is holding a bunch of flowers. The woman’s body is facing left and the man’s body is facing right. The man’s feet aren’t touching the ground - he seems to be floating in the air. They are kissing.”
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After you have finished describing the image to your students, ask them to reconstruct the description in pairs before they see the painting. This can be fun because students may think that they have either misunderstood the description (because of the impossibility aspect) or that you are trying to trick them in some way.
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A few more things to mention:
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1. I call this activity a mental image dictation because although there is no drawing involved, there is a serious image construction going on inside the students’ heads. Tell students that their minds are the canvasses. Tell them to make sure that they are completely clean before you start the description (this prepares them for listening).
2. As mentioned above, this activity works well for text reconstructions. Before you show the image to your students, ask them to write out the description as accurately as they can.
3. Repeat the description as many times as necessary. Make use of standard teacher talk techniques and considerations such as those in the word cloud below.
4. Finally, the important part that I didn’t have time to mention in my talk: Prepare your descriptions before you go into class. Look at the picture and decide exactly what language you would like to come from it. Write your description on a piece of paper. Now here is the trick: Place the text beside the image in the book/newspaper/etc. Remember, students won’t see what you are looking at. This way you can repeat your description, almost identically, each time you recite it. But make sure it doesn’t sound as if you are reading from a text. That is the trick to the success of this activity.