Oral drill

Oral drill    20/11/2013

        Oral drilling to learn sentence patterns is an age-old practice.  When  there was a strong stress on Communicative English which dominated the scene for last 20 over years,  I believe many English teachers if not all had abandoned this ancient practice of oral drilling.  It is the drilling until a learner learn the pronunciation of the words, phrases / sentence patterns.  

        Ya, I did drill my students on Forms of the Verb only.  Actually,  I should have drilled more.  Just spare 10 minutes a period for this oral practice.   In language learning, actually, a person learns faster by listening and sighting the words /audio-visual learning. 

     The sounds effect on a person is so much powerful than the silent words learning.  Sound effects stay on forever.  This is how I remember the songs that I learnt in Primary One and the Form teacher Mdm Wong Bao Ing as well.  She had taught us so many English songs, if I am not mistaken.   I still can sing those songs that I learnt in Primary One.  Oh, ya, it is also because there have been repetitions and rehearsals every now and then for me to remember them.  I might forget the verses of a complete song but the tune is always there. Look, if you don’t know how to pronounce an English word,  it is near to impossible to remember the word and then to be transferred to our permanent memory unless you have camera-like memory that you remember it in sight.

        Knowing an English  word without knowing the sounds of the word is “dumb” learning.   Language is meant for communication, especially the oral communication.   The ability to communicate orally will highly facilitate the written communication.   

        Tenses are important in the English language.  To grasp the concepts without mistakes, besides reading and creating situations to practise the usage, I see drilling the tenses can prove to be effective to reinforce the learning.   Isn't it true that a habit forms after practising it again and again?   Drilling to form the habit is a short-cut to learn words, phrases and sentence patterns but don’t over do it.  Drill can kill and makes a person ill, so never use the whole period for this activity or it will bore the learners to “death”.    

        Immediately after drilling, learners are expected to produce the target words, phrases or sentence patterns in sentences creatively.

     Drill the tenses they have learnt in order to reinforce the learning.

For example:

        We  clean our classroom every day.      (Simple Present Tense)

        We are cleaning our classroom now.       (Present Continuous Tense)

        We have cleaned the windows.            (Present Perfect Tense)

        They look sparklingly clean now.

        We have been cleaning our classroom since 7a.m. 
        Now it is 10 a.m.  We have cleaned it for  3 hours already.

        
        Then ask the learners to use a word to create to their own sentences with the 3 tenses as indicated.  This activity can make learning fun, creative and exciting, too.  You can involve the whole class asking them to compose in writtern words first before the oral presentation. 

        Ya, to piano play a song, you need to know the pattern of the song and through practices,  you memorise the musical notes and which key to press one after another.   It is by attentive listening to the tune.  Ya, a song has a fixed pattern / musical notes to remember.  So is a language, like English.

        Piano-playing a song needs to practise and practise to remember the musical notes.  It is learnt by habit and this habit will become spontaneous / natural /intuitive.  Isn't  it  language learning done in a similar way, too?