This post is about drilling and is written mainly for teachers in training and teachers who have not given this issue much thought so far. . I'll give some examples of drills, explain why they are used and hopefully get you to think about their advantages and disadvantages.
One of my go-to lesson starters, notably with Y8 to Y10 classes who had developed some skill with verbs, was to use a clearly structured transformation drill. This type of drill is typically when you say a sentence and the class has to change the sentence by transforming part of it but not usually adding any new elements or vocabulary.
For instance, the teacher says:
Today I'm playing football with my friends
The students respond (usually with hands up, although you can use cold-calling or written answers) by saying, for example:
Yesterday I played football with my friends
(If you model the exercise first student will know they have to change the verb form from present to past.)
Other examples of transformation drill:
- Changing a statement into a question, e.g. Sandra is in the classroom. -> Is Sandra in the classroom?
- Changing active voice into passive voice, e.g. Giang sold a new car. -> A new car was sold by by Giang.
- Changing affirmative sentences into negative sentences, e.g. I like orange juice. -> I don't like orange juice.
Although this type of mechanical drill is often criticised in research literature for lacking focus on meaning and for being, well, boring, I have always felt there is room for it. Why? Is it useful? What are students thinking and learning?
As students hear the sentence they are listening out for the verb form. It is quite possible they are also noticing or sub-consciously processing the other elements in the sentence. When they have noticed the verb form (in the present tense), they then need to quickly think how this changes to a past tense form. To do this they may be relying on: the phonological verb form (the sound of the -ed /t/ in English) and recall of a known chunk (I played). They may also, if time allows, be recalling explicitly how the past tense is formed ("I have to use the infinitive, then add and '-ed' which often sounds like /t/ (baked), but may also sound like like /d/ (played) or /id/ (landed). Imagine similar operations occurring for the language you teach. In French, for example, the key phonological clues are in the words 'j'ai' and 'joué'.
In each case, students are aware that the tense is changing and that you need to pay attention to the form for the meaning to be clear. This is called in the literature a form-meaning mapping. Mapping form to meaning is said to be a key to acquisition. In the transformation drill it is easy to argue that learning is taking advantage of both the explicit route (thinking about the form, applying a rule/pattern) and the implicit route ('picking up' the pattern unconsciously by repeated use). This, to me, is the value of this type of drill, limited though it is. For the classroom, I also like its clarity - students know exactly what they have to do. If they alreday have a good grasp of the difference between the two tense forms, then they are further automatising their knowledge and, in other terms, strengthening their memory storage.
The limitation of the this type of drill, is that the content is not interesting and that there is not significant communication going on. It's quite clear that making too much use of drills like this is a recipe for boredom. So I'd say 'use in moderation' when there there is a specific learning goal (in this case strengthening grasp of tense changes).
The transformation is different from a substitution drill where students have to replace something you said (e.g. a word or phrase) with a different one. Here is an example:
The teacher says:
Yesterday I played football with my friends
Students respond:
Yesterday I played tennis with my friends
Or
Yesterday I watched a movie with my friends
Other examples of substitution drill:
- Teacher: You’re a student, aren’t you? Students: You’re a farmer, aren’t you?
- Teacher: You’re a farmer, aren’t you? Students: You’re an accountant, aren’t you?
- Teacher: You’re an accountant, aren’t you? Students: You’re a mechanic, aren’t you?
What's happening the case of substitution drills?
Students have to process the meaning of the source sentence, then retrieve from long-term memory alternative verbs, nouns, time markers or noun phrases. This should be more demanding that the previous drill, since more recall is required. In addition, the drill allows for more invention from students as they choose their own meaning to express. This should make the drill more appealing. There is focus on from (e.g. getting the verb right) as well as focus on meaning.
You can combine the elements of transformation and substitution is a drill. For example, the teacher says:
Today I'm playing football with my friends
The students reply (for example):
Yesterday I played hockey with the my friends
(The verb is transformed and the sport substituted.)
You can see how this drill is more mentally demanding. In cognitive science terms it carries higher cognitive load because there are more 'interacting elements' to keep in play when working out the possible response.
Another twist on this type of drill is to combine transformation, substitution and addition.
For example, the teacher says:
Today I'm playing football with my friends
The students respond (for example:
Last week I played hockey with my friends at the park
You can see how this added element ('at the park') adds more complexity and cognitive load. You can get students to add more than one new element.
Now, these drills were all the rage back in the 1960s. The teacher and scholar Wilga Rivers wrote about drills at length in her classic handbooks for language teachers. You can read about her here. But Rivers was well aware of the limitations of drills and put them in the category of skill-getting, not skill-using. To quote from that linked article: "... language educators need to facilitate their students’ skill-using, best cultivated through interaction and communication (but) ...drills are effective in helping students acquire knowledge of a language..."
So, let's be clear, skill using is much more important that skill-getting through drills. But I have tried to show that drills, even quite mechanical ones, can have a place in promoting both explicit and implicit learning, noticing and form-meaning mapping. They have the added advantages of being very clear to students and adaptable in a number of ways. They can be part of a teaching sequence where you move from highly structured, controlled exercises to more creative ones in the PPP tradition. Because they are taking place in the target language they provide comprehensible input and avoid using the first language unnecessarily. When the more creative forms of drill are used, they can be amusing and cognitively challenging for the right students.
An important point to make in terms of teacher workload, is that drills take little or no preparation.
Finally, drilling can mean different things to different people. The examples above are at the more mechanical end of the spectrum. For a range of other classroom activities which may be said to be forms of drilling, try this article from the British Council.
What do you think?
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