Back in the late 1950s through to, broadly speaking, the early 70s audiolingual drills were a staple of classroom language teaching. They drew on the behaviourist view of learning which held that learning was the result of a change behaviour caused by reactions to stimuli. This stimulus-response model was thought to enable new habits to be "stamped in" through repetition. Drills were commonplace in old courses such as Longman's Audio-Visual French, while question-answer drills were a major feature of Marc Gilbert's Cours Illustré de Français. Language labs, commonly introduced in the 1960s, were well suited to oral drilling - and made the practice more appealing for some (including me!).
When Communicative Language Teaching and more 'natural' comprehension-based approaches became more popular from the 1970s, repetitive drills where students had to repeatedly respond to a stimulus to improve their 'habits' fell out of favour. There were good reasons for this. Often the language content of drills was of no interest and designed to elicit uses of a particular grammatical structure. Drills could be boring and any learning they produced did not seem to translate into spontaneous speech. Communication was the order of the day - the idea that we learn a language best when we use it for what it was intended for, as Krashen once said. The consensus now is that language acquisition happens most effectively when students are exposed to meaningful, interesting input and can interact with it, with some focus on the form of the language ('teaching grammar') helping the process along.
But as can happen in the history of language teaching, bandwagons come along and older practices get dropped, even if they have some value.
When you look at drills in the modern context, it's possible to see them not (in the behaviourist way) just as an attempt to stamp in habits, but (in the cognitivist way) as an opportunity to provide repetition, meaningful input - albeit not very interesting - and the focus on form which is thought to accelerate learning. By rehearsing patterns in working memory, there is a chance that these patterns can find their way into long-term memory, using the memory models currently in vogue. When doing a drill students repeat, manipulate and retrieve language, think about it and produce output which is thought to reinforce memory. In terms of lexicogrammar, drills allow chunks to be heard, read and practised over and over again. Some drills require a degree of elaborate processing, which is said to enhance learning and memory. (Whether language learning happens this way is a matter for debate - not one for this blog post.) Drills can be a useful part of a teacher's repertoire, used occasionally to provide input and repetition of particular patterns or grammatical forms.
In a common model of memory rehearsal takes place in Working Memory. In the case of drills it's in the Phonological Loop, part of Working Memory that rehearsal takes place. The idea is that rehearsal prevents forgetting, just as when you say a phone number out loud to yourself repeatedly so that you will recall it later.
Essentially, I'm suggesting that we can put drills in a contemporary, cognitivist context and justify their use within a much richer diet of language learning tasks.
Now, back in the day when drills were an art form, they were classified in detail by type (e.g. in classic language teaching books by Wilga Rivers - worth seeking out on Ebay). Each one had a technical name such as 'transformational drill' or 'substitution drill'. Below I'll describe a few simple examples which you could use, if you don't already or if you haven't come across this type of drilling. Let me stress that I only see these as something to use occasionally, for example as lesson starters or fillers.
As you look at each example, think what is going on in the student's head as they formulate a response. Could it help them learn?
• Read a sentence in one tense which students must put into another, e.g. I play football becomes I played football.
• Read a sentence one or more elements of which students have to change by retrieving a word or phrase of their own, e.g. I went to the supermarket becomes I went to the baker’s.
• Read a sentence to which students add new elements, e.g. I went for a walk with my brother becomes I went for a walk with my brother in the park.
• Begin a sentence which students must finish, e.g. I went into the kitchen and… becomes I went into the kitchen and made a coffee.
• Read a sentence and tell students to change the subject pronoun (which often requires an associated change in the verb form and other parts of a sentence), e.g. I played tennis with my friend could become We played tennis with our friends.
• Read a sentence which students must put in a negative form, e.g. I often go to the cinema becomes I never go to the cinema.
As mentioned above, it's possible to see question-answer sequences as a type of drill, but to my mind they are different since they do involve a form of communication, albeit contrived.
To finish, I would just mention that I found drills such as the above to be a useful way of beginning a lesson, reviewing language patterns used previously in different contexts. I believe students liked their repetitive nature, predictability and relative ease. Drills enable you work largely or wholly in the target language. Furthermore, they can be transformed from an oral activity into a written one. You might, for example, do the drill orally with no written support at all or do it with the cues shown on the board. Whichever option you choose, the drill can be repeated as a written exercise, reinforcing in memory the oral practice.
In our new book on memory, Gianfranco and I explain in more detail how working memory functions, why rehearsal and repetition are important, the importance of elaborate processing and how long-term memory is developed.
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