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Friday, October 27, 2006

Using Repetition Drills

<!--[if !vml]--><!--[endif]-->Immediately after the presentation of a new structure or vocabulary field, the students need a controlled practice stage in which they have the chance to focus exclusively on the new language and start to familiarise themselves with it. What the student says and how it is said is controlled by the activity and restricts the student to the target item. The lower the level, the more important this stage is. The students do not have to speak spontaneously, and therefore do not have to focus on what they want to say at the same time as considering how to say it. Their output is 100% predictable.

The simplest and most controlled of these types of activity is a repetition drill - the teacher simply says a sentence containing the target structure (or even just the lexical item being taught) and the students repeat it. This can be done :

• Silently : the students repeat the sentence or word to themselves in their minds to try and get a mental image of the item. This stage is often skipped, but I find it invaluable.
• Chorally : the whole class, or in a larger class, groups of students repeat the sentence/word together.
• Individually : the teacher calls on one student at a time to repeat the target item.

The staging Silent - Choral - Individual repetition is in increasing order of challenge for the student and should generally be done in that order. If students are having problems, however, it may sometimes be useful to backtrack to an earlier stage.

Here are some dos and don"ts for using repetition drills effectively :

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