Page 40 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom

Approaches to Language Teaching

Example: This phone is not yours, it is ... – This phone is not yours, it is
mine.
3. Transformation: transforming a statement into a question, a negative
statement, etc.
Example: She likes potatoes.
Does shelikepotatoes?
She doesn’t like potatoes.

Today, it is generally believed that audiolingualism failed on several fronts.
First, it was clear that although attention was mainly directed at listening
and speaking, learners were not allowed to use language freely since this
would mean making errors and errors could become bad habits. And as
learners were encouraged to avoid errors, they rarely used the language
spontaneously, which means that there was very little meaningful communi-
cation involved. However, although the audiolingual approach was replaced
by other methods in the 1970s and 1980s, several techniques which were
developed in the audiolingual era, such as different types of drilling, have
survived and are still popular today.

Communicative Drill
Since the downfall of the audiolingual approach, drilling and repetition have
been frowned upon in language classes. However, in his talk at the IATEFL
Conference in 2014, Harmer (2014) invited teachers to re-examine the role
of drilling in the classroom by pointing out that even though drilling is
teacher- rather than learner-centred, this is not necessarily a disadvantage
since teachers are, after all, good language models. It is true that drilling is
uncreative and conditioning, but language is essentially a habit. Children
learn their first language by endlessly repeating after adults. In addition, es-
pecially for young learners, drilling is safe and learners feel confident when
they know the right words.
Harmer (2014) gives two suggestions for making drilling an effective FLT
technique. First, do not overuse it. Drilling should be deliberate, it should not
take too much time and, most importantly, it should be problem-solving. In
other words, if a teacher notices that the learners are struggling with a struc-
ture, she may decide to introduce a short drilling activity to deal with the
problem. For example, owing to negative transfer, a typical mistake in prepo-
sition use made by Slovene learners is *‘let’s go with a car’ or *‘we went with
a plane.’ The teacher may decide to teach the learners a short clapping song
with this structure:

40