1 Mechanical Drills

Reference Paulston and BruderPaulson and Bruder (1976, p. 3) describe mechanical drills as involving ‘complete control of the response and only one correct way of responding’. Reference DeKeyser, Doughty and WilliamsDeKeyser (1998, p. 53) goes on to explain that in mechanical drills, learners are only practising ‘language-like behaviour’ and ‘shuffling forms around’ rather than conveying meaning. The problem with drills is that it is possible to carry them out without understanding what is being said at all. This type of practice was very common in the audio-lingual classroom and has been criticised for not helping learners learn to use language in communication.

For proceduralisation, and therefore learning, to occur, language forms need to be associated with meaning. In this way, form-meaning links or mappings are built up in long-term memory (we discussed the importance of these in Chapter 5). For example, when a learner of English realises that when someone says they are ‘going to do something’ (form), they are talking about a future intention (meaning), they have made a form-meaning mapping. As we have already mentioned, drills can be carried out without understanding the language being used at all, and so don’t help these form-meaning mappings to be established.

However, Reference DeKeyser and DeKeyserDeKeyser (2007) doesn’t go as far as saying that there is NO place for mechanical drills inside the classroom. He mentions that drills can be helpful for some learning, for example, pronunciation and verb forms. Reference HarmerHarmer (2012) also explains that drills help students ‘to get used to new language’ (p. 109). In discussing opportunities for ‘language-focused learning’ in the classroom, Reference NationNation (2007) talks about the importance of including ‘pronunciation practice, using substitution tables and drills [and] learning vocabulary from word cards’ (p. 6) in the classroom. An example from Jessica’s classroom is when Rosie and her game partners are busy playing the snake game (see Figure 6.2). In Example 6.2, Ruby and Chanelle focus on the question ‘Qu’est-ce que tu aimes faire en hiver?’ (‘What do you like doing in winter?’). However, Rosie has noticed the form ‘en été’ (‘in summer’) from the preceding question ‘Qu’est-ce que tu aimes faire en été?’ (‘What do you like doing in summer?’) and she has decided to ‘take time out’ to repeat ‘en été’ to herself. In this way she can practise the pronunciation of this expression, which presumably is one that is new to her.

Figure 6.2

The ‘snake game’

(See an English version of this game in the Appendix)

Of course, here Rosie takes the initiative to do this on her own, but the teacher could also have had the whole class practise their pronunciation of this and similar phrases. What the teacher, Jessica, did do during the lesson was to stop the whole class so that they could recite together the conjugation of the verb ‘être’ (je suis, tu es, etc.) to the tune of ‘The Pink Panther’.

In an interview Jessica talks further about the type of mechanical drills that she has her students work on in the classroom and how useful they are for teaching verb conjugations. She explains how for ‘-er’ verbs she teaches a ‘little rhyme; “e, es, e, ons, ez, ent” you know for the endings’ and how her students respond positively ‘they absolutely loved the “e, es, e, ons, ez, ent”’ and said “we want more of that”’. She also describes a song (a round), to the tune of ‘Frère Jacques’, that she uses for teaching the conjugation of ‘avoir’ (to have):

Such short drills and songs can help learners retain formulaic knowledge and explicit (declarative) knowledge that they can draw on in production. But, where input and opportunity for communicative use is limited, the danger is that students become dependent on this declarative knowledge and never progress beyond it.

2 Meaningful Practice

We argue, as Reference DeKeyser and DeKeyserDeKeyser (2007) and others note, that mechanical drills are of limited benefit in the language classroom. They can be useful as an early aid to memory, as we have seen in the previous section. They can also be helpful for aspects of the language which are less noticeable, or which are less meaningful, and so, therefore, are harder for learners to pick up. In foreign language contexts where input and time are limited, however, Reference DeKeyser and DeKeyserDeKeyser (2007) argues strongly in favour of the inclusion of meaningful and communicative drills. This is because the latter allow learners to make connections between a language form and its meaning and, therefore, do allow for the process of proceduralisation. In this chapter we are going to refer rather to meaningful and communicative ‘practice’, because we consider that the term ‘drill’ does little to describe the way that language is used in these types of practice. Meaningful practice can be understood as practice that a student cannot complete without understanding what is being said (Reference Paulston and BruderPaulston & Bruder, 1976).

Jessica had her twenty-seven Year 9 students work at meaningful practice as they prepared for an oral assessment. We have had glimpses into Jessica’s classroom elsewhere in this book; Jessica teaches in a single-sex, state-run girls’ school. Her students have three fifty-minute lessons a week throughout the year. In Year 11 they will sit a national exam, the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA). One of the components of NCEA, the ‘Interact Standard’, requires students to ‘interact using spoken French to communicate personal information, ideas and opinions in different situations’ (www.nzqa.govt.nz). Jessica’s school decided that at the end of Year 9, their first year of learning French, all students would have the opportunity to take part in a mock ‘Interact Standard’.

Jessica gives some information about how her students will be assessed as they interact in pairs.

To prepare for this assessment Jessica devised a game (see Figure 6.2; see also an English version of the game in the Appendix). It was played with a dice and counters, and as students landed on the different sections of the snake shape, they had to answer specific questions. An answer in French meant they could advance, a response in English meant they had to go backwards. The language that Jessica chose to include in the game was language that the students had already been introduced to. This is an important point.

Reference NationNation (2007) claims that in developing fluency,

the language that students work with should be largely familiar to them. In an interview, Jessica describes the language work (we highlight the target language and include translations) that predated the practice described in this chapter. This was, firstly, a unit that the students had previously completed and, secondly, a poster they had written about themselves using the language of the unit.

In this chapter we describe the lesson that Jessica taught to allow her students to consolidate and revise this language work, described above.

Jessica allowed students to work in groups of approximately three as they played the game. They were able to choose which groups they worked in (something that adolescents say is important to them, see Chapter 2). When students had completed the game, they were given the choice of either playing it again outside in the corridor or doing some writing. They were told that, in the writing, they should develop their ideas based on the language they had practiced.

That this type of practice was meaningful is evident from the fact that the students had to understand what each question was asking and then find the French to construct an answer that was an appropriate response. We can see in Example 6.2 that Ruby has actually translated the question ‘Qu’est-ce que tu aimes faire en hiver?’ Perhaps the fact that she has done this indicates that she and/or Chanelle were not entirely familiar with the language of the question and needed the English to help her/them. Chanelle has responded appropriately by saying she watches television (‘En hiver je regarder la télé’), albeit without conjugating the verb ‘regarder’, to watch.

We can hypothesise that the kind of meaningful practice provided by this game presented students with opportunities for language proceduralisation, as seen in Example 6.2, and automatisation, as seen in Example 6.3. In Example 6.3, the two students, Hannah and Francesca, appear more at ease with the meaning of the question forms and with answering them. This may be because they are playing this game for a fourth time, at this stage of the lesson. These students elected for a second practice in the corridor outside of the classroom, rather than doing written work inside, and during each of the two practice sessions that the teacher made time for in this lesson, they played the game twice.

The increased practice that these two students had may have served to develop automatisation, resulting in an improvement in language fluency. This is suggested by Hannah and Francesca’s responses to a written questionnaire filled out at the end of the lesson. When asked what they thought they had learnt in the lesson, Hannah noted ‘coming up with answers on the spot’ and Francesca ‘answering questions on the spot’.

3 Communicative Practice

To answer this question, we need to establish what is meant by communicative practice. In communicative practice activities, the actual exchange of information is the goal of the communication and the information that is exchanged is something that the listener (or reader) does not already know (Reference DeKeyser and DeKeyserDeKeyser, 2007). In other words, there has to be some sort of communicative gap that is bridged as the practice takes place. It is hard to be sure if there was a gap for Jessica’s students and whether, as they played this snake game, they were learning something new about their conversation partners. They may have already had a reasonable amount of knowledge about their classmates and there may have been little that was new for them to find out (especially as students self-selected their partners and tended to interact with their friends). This exchange of new information or ‘gap’ is important because it motivates learners to pay attention to each other as they communicate. Listening to each other is also important for learning; it is an opportunity for learners to be exposed to language input (as we saw in Chapter 3).

One simple way that this game could be made into communicative practice is to tell the students that, as they played the game, they had to tell one lie and that their partner had to correctly specify, at the end of the game, what that lie was. That would ensure that students attended to each other’s answers and that there was a focus on the information being exchanged.

The First Principle Is that Language Practice Needs to Be Interactive

Fortunately, it may be relatively easy to facilitate ‘interactive practice’ in the language classroom where adolescents are the learners, for two main reasons. Firstly, the adolescent language learner prefers cooperative learning over teacher-fronted learning; this means that learners are more likely to be attending to language in exchanges initiated by peers than those initiated by the teacher (Reference WilliamsWilliams, 1999). Secondly, relationships with peers are very important, as we saw in Chapter 1.

There are several reasons why language practice needs to be interactive, the most obvious being that there are far more opportunities for learners to use language when they are interacting in pairs or groups than when the teacher is directing the interactions. Another reason why interactive language practice is important is that, during practice, learners have opportunities to negotiate for meaning, to identify problems and to seek solutions. We will look at these in Examples 6.4 and 6.5 from Jessica’s classroom where we argue that, through the interactions that took place as the students worked in groups of three, students could have had opportunities to expand their language competence.

It is obvious from the rising intonation Ruby uses at the beginning of this interaction that she was not sure that her message was clear. However, through the interaction that follows she receives positive feedback that she had communicated what she intended. Both students paid attention to the meaning of what was said.

In Example 6.5 Amelia realises that she does not know or remember the word for Saturday in French. Her conversation partner provides it for her.

Three days later Amelia was able to give the correct word for Saturday in French; this is some evidence that this exchange during language practice had led to vocabulary development for Amelia.

Having a classroom environment where students are able to work together collaboratively, as they do in these examples, is something that is unlikely to happen by chance (see Chapter 1). The teacher may need to train students to work together in ways so that they are able to encourage and support their peers and give them the type of feedback that will promote learning (Reference Philp, Sato and BallingerPhilp, 2016; Reference Sato and BallingerSato & Bollinger, 2012). Building an environment where the relationships are positive and where there is a high degree of trust may take time. At the same time, as students work together in these ways, it will be important that the teacher monitors group work and provides support and scaffolding as necessary (Reference Philp, Adams and IwashitaPhilp et al., 2013).

The Second Principle Is that Practice Needs to Be Meaningful

Reference Ortega and DeKeyserOrtega’s (2007) principle that practice needs to be meaningful reinforces DeKeyser’s claim that only meaningful or communicative practice can help learners ‘proceduralise’ knowledge so that it is available for use. Ortega argues, as we have already discussed, that meaningful practice may do more than facilitate proceduralisation, it can be ‘competence-expanding’, that is, it can act as a catalyst for new language learning. For example, she claims that learners may have the opportunity to realise that they need language that they do not have and may ask for help from a teacher or from a peer (we have an example of the latter in Example 6.5). Example 6.6 is an example of a student asking the teacher for a word they do not know and then using this word in a sentence, pushing their language (see Chapter 4) output to attempt a grammatical structure that they haven’t yet mastered (note that we have already explained in the ‘Meaningful Practice’ section how the game that the learners in Jessica’s classroom played required a focus on meaning).

Example 6.6 is part of the same conversation as Example 6.4, a little further on in the practice activity and this time Chanelle joins the interaction along with Ruby and Rosie. This is an instance where the students are focused on really communicating a message (we could say that at this point the students ‘step outside’ the meaningful practice activity, so to speak, and that it becomes an actual conversation) as either Ruby or Rosie (not possible to distinguish exactly who from the recording) asks Chanelle why she does not like Lorde. Chanelle needs the word for ‘weird’ in French and so asks for assistance from the teacher. That this exchange was competence-expanding and led to new language learning for Chanelle is attested by the fact that three days later she was able to say what the word for ‘weird’ was in French and was also able to demonstrate that she could correct ‘parce qu’elle c’est bizarre’ to ‘parce que c’est bizarre’.

The examples given here come from a unit of work taught over three lessons. Examples 6.7 and 6.8 come from the lesson following the one (on a Monday) that has so far been described. This next lesson, on a Wednesday, also had the aim of giving learners practice in using language they were already familiar with. As Jessica says in the interview:

In Wednesday’s lesson she gave each student a whiteboard and asked them to write

as many questions as they could remember. She then asked them to find someone and ask them the questions on their whiteboard. A little later in the lesson she asked students to find someone new and ask their questions again. Many of the questions that the students wrote were similar to the ones they had worked with during the game the previous day. In Example 6.7, as Rosie formulates her answer, she has the opportunity to notice a ‘hole’ or gap

in her own language competence (see Chapter 4).

Chanelle uses the correct form for the structure that Rosie is not sure about. We do not have the data to know whether Rosie noticed this or learnt from it, but potentially, the opportunity to realise what she didn’t know could have been a catalyst for learning.

In Example 6.8 Rosie is now talking with a new conversational partner. She has the opportunity to try out a language form that she is not sure about – ‘d’accord’. Having used it, she then queries whether it was appropriate in the context in which she used it.

A little later in the lesson the teacher asks for questions and Rosie seizes this opportunity in Example 6.9.

We can see from Examples 6.5 to 6.9 that Jessica had intended the practice that students were engaged in to promote fluency and to allow them to work with the language that they had already been introduced to in class. Yet, it also provided opportunities for students to push their language output, to notice what they did not know, to try out and experiment with language and to get feedback and help from each other. All of these processes could have contributed to new language learning because on these occasions students were working at a level slightly beyond what they could cope with, as Reference Ortega and DeKeyserOrtega (2007) describes (see Chapter 4), at 0 + 1, or output plus one level (in a mirror image of Krashen’s input + 1 metaphor, see Chapter 3).

In Chapter 1 we discussed the importance of environmental support in promoting learning in the classroom. In this section we see good examples of environmental support in the trust and support that students experienced from and gave each other as they practised language together. The positive and collaborative ways in which they worked led to opportunities for language learning.

The Third Principle Is that There Should Be a Focus on Task-Essential Forms

Ortega claims that there is a need for intensive practice of specific aspects or forms of a language. When a teacher knows what particular language structure, or language structures, they think that their students need to practise, it can be a challenge to design a practice activity or task that requires them to use this structure or structures. In other words, this/these structure(s) need(s) to be essential, so that it is not possible to complete the task/activity without using it/them. The ‘task essential’ form in the snake game would appear to be the expression ‘aimer faire’ (‘to like doing’). In the interview, Jessica identifies this expression as one that is prominent. As we see in Example 6.10 where Francesca and Hannah play the game during the first lesson, the game succeeds in having students practise this structure intensively (as underlined).

This structure was salient or obvious to at least one learner, Rosie, as she played the game during the lesson. This is evident from her response to the following question in the written questionnaire that she filled out at the end of the lesson:

To summarise, in this section we’ve illustrated features of optimal practice activities. They are interactive

and meaningful,

and they provide opportunities for learners to focus on form or on specific language structures. These three features are important because they have the potential to help learners notice, reflect on,

and experiment with language. When learners have these opportunities, they are more likely to acquire language.

In this next section, we return to the idea of Nation’s four strands and focus on what Nation says about language practice.

Nation’s ‘Fluency Development’ Strand

As we have already seen, Reference NationNation (2007) argues that a well-balanced language course should consist of four strands.

Nation’s Four Strands

Practice allows for the development of ‘fluency’. However, Reference NationNation (2009, p. 2) paints a negative picture of the attention that is given to this strand: ‘there are courses that give useful attention to language features, but that do not provide opportunities for the learners to become truly fluent in using what they know’.

As well as emphasising the need for adequate practice time, Nation outlines what he considers are the essential conditions. Two of these we have already discussed in this chapter; that is, firstly, the need for students to be working with language that is largely familiar to them and, secondly, the need for a focus on receiving or conveying meaning.

Two other requirements for building fluency are the need for some pressure or encouragement to perform at a faster than usual speed, and the need for a large amount of input (for the receptive skills of listening

and reading)

and output (for the productive skills of speaking

and writing).

In other words, time on task is important to building fluency. We could argue that in Jessica’s classroom, there was evidence of a large amount of output in that the students spent the major part of two fifty-minute lessons either interacting in pairs

or using the language they had practiced orally to write about themselves. In the lessons we observed in Jessica’s classroom, there was no mention by the teacher that students should increase their speed at any stage of the practice. However, it seems that at least one student was aware that this was the aim. In a written questionnaire at the end of the lesson, Rosie wrote in response to the question:

Another very effective way of promoting fluency in oral language that makes use of time pressure

is the 4/3/2 technique (Reference Nation and MacalisterNation & Macalister, 2010). In this activity, learners work in pairs, with one acting as speaker and the other as listener. The speaker talks for four minutes on a specific topic, then moves to another pair and gives the same information to a new partner, but this time in three minutes. Lastly, the speaker gives a two-minute talk on the same topic to another new partner.

Reference Nation, Macalister and NationNation (2011) makes another important point about language practice, although this advice need not only apply to the ‘language practice’ context. He says that in language practice, the students need to be doing the work. In other words, there should be relatively little ‘teacher-fronted’ classroom focus.