A standard way to introduce or practise a grammatical structure is by means of sentence combining drills. Look at the example below, taken from frenchteacher.net, which focuses on the meaning and form of present participles in French. Strictly speaking, in this case the exercise is about combining two clauses, not sentences. The exercise is a typical audiolingual one in style, based on the idea that by repeating the structure numerous times you are helping students to internalise it. “Internalise” in this context means embed it in long term memory, automatise, or help it to be “acquired”, ready to be used spontaneously in the future. Now, it’s very unlikely that an exercise of this type would achieve the aim of automatisation on its own, but by bringing the form and meaning to the attention of the learner, it should, in combination with comprehensible input featuring the structure’s use, along with other activities, more or less communicative, help students use the structure...
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