Drilling
Drilling has certainly fallen out of favour in recent
years. Strongly associated with the behaviourist approach it is often seen as
non-communicative, boring, patronising…. A recent ELTChat on the subject
brought up all the negatives, but also provided a long list of positive reasons
for drilling. For example:
Building confidence
Helping learners get their tongues round new words
Picking up pace and getting students’ attention
Developing ability to produce (and understand)
connected speech
And perhaps the key reason, for me at any rate:
drilling or repetition is an important step towards fluency. Especially at
lower levels, it is quite natural to rehearse (at least mentally) before
tackling a speaking situation. Repeating
something helps us to ‘notice’ what we are repeating and assimilate it into our
store of language. The ELTChat I referred to concentrated mostly on drilling
words or single chunks. There are plenty of benefits to this, but in this post
I want to concentrate on some techniques which are probably even more out of
favour: drilling and repeating dialogues and narratives.
Dialogue builds
I did my CELTA so long ago that it wasn’t even called
that then (!). It was also at IH in Cairo, which I rather suspect was a little
behind the times in terms of materials. The result was that my initial training
centred around the coursebook series Streamlines and Strategies. Lots of
drilling and repetition.
One of the first techniques I learnt was a dialogue
build. For the uninitiated, it goes like this: Set up the situation, using a
photo (or in pre-IWB days two stick figures on the board). Elicit where the
characters are, who they are, what’s happening and so on. This is often a
service encounter (e.g. in a café), but can be anything you like.
Then you elicit the dialogue from the students, line
by line. As you accept each line, you help learners correct it if necessary and
then model the final version, with appropriate connected speech and intonation,
getting the students to repeat it. You DON’T write the dialogue on the board,
but do indicate where each line starts and who is speaking. You might also add
question marks or little visual clues. As you go through the dialogue you keep
returning to the start, getting students to keep repeating the dialogue, and
thus memorising it. You can do this whole class, or divide the class into the
number of characters or ask individuals to do each line. It’s good to have a
bit of variety here.
Once the class knows the dialogue by heart, they can
practise a little more in pairs, changing roles. You can also have a bit of fun
with it by getting one of the characters to change their answers, so that the
first person has to react spontaneously. (Good idea to model what to do first
with lower level learners) Finally, you can elicit the dialogue once more,
writing it onto the board so that the students have a clear written version.
Alternatively, you could get students to come up and write it on the board,
giving scope for some work on correcting spellings, missing articles and so on.
A dialogue build is a great technique to have up your
sleeve for a last minute cover lesson. It’s obviously most appropriate for
lower level learners, but could be done with more advanced students if the
chunks of language elicited were more demanding. At the end of it, the students
have memorised a whole set of (hopefully useful) chunks of language and can
produce them fluently at will. Fluent speakers are essentially those who have
enough chunks of language that they can stick together to keep going, so teaching
chunks in this way is a real help.
It’s also an excellent activity to do with learners
with low levels of literacy. I can’t understand why it isn’t an ESOL staple.
You don’t need any equipment except a board and pens (great for those community
halls), it doesn’t rely at all on reading and writing, it can be adapted for
specific situations that learners might have to deal with (ringing for a
doctor’s appointment, for example) and once it’s elicited onto the board it
provides a copying activity where the meaning is already very clear (and was
indeed student generated).
Alternative versions
Instead of eliciting the whole dialogue, you could
give them one half or the dialogue (i.e. all that one person says) and elicit
the missing responses. Then proceed as above. A good alternative for learners
who can read quite well, is to start by writing the elicited dialogue onto the
board. Drill as a class, making sure you are giving a good model of natural
pronunciation, then ask learners to practise it in pairs. As they are
practising, gradually wipe off words and lines from the dialogue. As it
disappears, they have to remember more and more. Finally you can re-elicit it
onto the board or get them to write it down on the board, or in pairs on paper.
This could work equally well with a narrative.
Another old, but great, idea comes from Mario
Rinvolucri’s book, Dictation. In this activity, you do the repeating (at least
to start with) and the students listen and mime the actions. It works really
well with younger learners, but if you have a lively class, adults could enjoy
it too. Here’s the text (slightly adapted)
You’re standing in front of the Coke machine. Put your
hand in your back pocket. Take out three 50p coins. Put them in one by one. You
hear the machine click. Choose your drink and press the button. You hear a
terrible groan from the machine. Clunk! A can drops down. Pick it up. Open the
can. It squirts Coke in your face. Take a tissue out of your pocket. Rub your
eye. Lick your lips. Take a sip. Burp!
First read the text right through, just to orientate
students. Then read again and elicit a movement for each line. Get all the
students doing it. Then read a third time with all the students doing all the
movements. You can make this stage fast
as possible if you want a bit of fun. Then give the students a version of the
text with most of it missing. They have to work together to recreate the text.
This is a form of dictogloss, but the difference is
that doing the actions should help them to remember what’s missing. If they get
stuck, get them to do the actions and try and remember that way. This is the
stage at which they should be drilling the language themselves, as they try to
recall it. You can obviously differentiate this activity by giving less of the
text to more able students and vice versa. Finally you get the whole class to
carry out the actions while saying the text (from memory).
All of these ideas are extremely preparation-light and
student generated. They provide a way to help learners appropriate new chunks
of language to their store, and the challenge of memorisation also provides
interest and stimulation. Maybe it’s time for a revival?
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