The communicative trend to English teaching, which started during the 60's, came up with new concepts about the nature of language. Since then, teachers all over the world have regarded communicative methods as the best and most suitables for any teaching context. As a matter of fact, all the previous approaches and techniques to language teaching either lost their prestige, or were told to be inferior. Another trend in the so called "communicative methodologies" is the use of tasks rather than drills, which were much more common in the audiolingual method. I strongly believe that it is feasible and desirable to turn drills into a communicative purpose. Actually, I have been trying to do that for quite a long time. When I first started teaching English, I was sort of skeptical about the effectiveness of drills, I must admit. But currently, I have completely made up my mind about the fact that drills, if applied in the right context, may result in a good deal of students' talking time.
I am going to talk about one experience I had in one of my classes for young learners. They are at the age of eight. The topic was food. There were 10 students. I tried to make drills more meaningful for them in order to have them practice vocabulary and speak. It was like that:
1) MEANINGFUL TOPIC
It is very important to present the topic in a meningful and realistic way. So, Instead of saying that they were going to learn how to make affirmative and negative sentences in the present simple with the verb "to drink/to eat", I told them that that day we would talk about foods and drinks.
2) TOTAL PHYSICAL RESPONSE-TPR
I asked student to stand up and do the same gestures and sounds I was doing. When I said "drink", I pretended I was drinking a glass of water and did the sound "gut, gut, gut". All the students repeated the words and imitated the sound and gestures. When I said "eat", I pretended I was eating a sandwich and did the sound "yammy, yammy, yammy", all the students did so. After some minutes of repetition, we sat on the floor and I put some flashcards with pictures of food and drink on the ground. I asked students to repeat after me. When they were used to the words I played the CD and they had to touch the picture of the food/drink they heard. Then I played agaid and they had to put the pictures in the order correct order.
3) BOARD SUPPORT
I asked student to sit down and then divided the board into two columns. I wrote "eat" and "drink" on each side and then asked students to glue the cards on the board. I explained those verbs by doing gestures and sounds again. I started the activity, when I said "apple" I picked one student and he/she had to stick the card on the side where it was written "food", I did the same for the drinks and asked students to participate at random. At the end of this activity, I wrote "I" before "eat" and "drink" and "everyday" after the pictures. I asked them to speak complete sentences and they did. All of them came up with sentences like, "I eat apple everyday" and "I drink milk everyday".
4) CHECK UNDERSTANDING
I started a quick closed chat just to check if students understood the sentences. I asked questions like "do you eat chocolate everyday?" or "do you eat vegetables everyday?" using flashcards and gestures, they had to answers "yes, I do" or "no, I don't". It was incredible to see how well they coped with those questions!
5) MEANINGFUL DRILLS
After all the presentation and practice, I decided to use another drill. I said "apple/and /bread" and students had to say "I eat apple and bread everyday". When I said "milk/but/orange juice" they had to say "I drink milk but I don't drink orange juice everyday". I did some examples with them and asked them to repeat. Later on I just said the key words and they built sentences.
6) WRITTEN PRODUCTION
I handed out worksheets with crosswords, exercises to form sentences and drawings so that they could write and colour.
7) ECLECTIC APPROACH
I have been doing things like that with the same group since the beginning of the year. What I try to do is to manage the class in the right tempo by varying activities, techniques and approaches, as a result, parents have come to talk to me and say how happy they are to see that their kids are now able to communicate lots of things in English.