Drilling Games and Activities
- Focus: Speaking, pronunciation, lexis, grammar
- Level: Any
- Age: All
- Target language: Any
- Time: 5 minutes+
- Preparation: Minimal
The concept of drilling has its roots in behaviourist approaches to language teaching, such as audiolingualism, which believed that learning a language was largely about habit formation. However, while language teaching has moved on to other methods and approaches, drilling remains a popular activity in language classrooms for a number of reasons:
- it provides intensive controlled practice of hearing and producing a particular language point;
- it allows the teacher to give immediate feedback, and to hear immediate improvement;
- it focuses students on the correct pronunciation and form;
- it helps memorisation and automatisation of language structure, patterns and chunks;
- it can be an effective form of class control;
- it meets students’ expectations of language learning.
The simplest method of drilling is simply to tell students to repeat after you. However, this is likely to get old quickly if you do a lot of drilling.
In this post you will therefore find a range of drilling games and activities to inject more creativity, humour and engagement into your lessons.
Procedures
Backchaining/frontchaining
In this technique, the teacher breaks down the sentence or phrase to be drilled, starting with the words at one end and working to the other end. E.g.
T: I’m having fish and chips tonight.
T: chips tonight
C: chips tonight
T: fish and chips tonight
C: fish and chips tonight
T: I’m having fish and chips tonight
C: I’m having fish and chips tonight
Mill drill
In a mill drill, the students stand up, walk around the classroom and speak to everyone. You might give all the students a different question to ask or sentence prompt. In some mill drills, students swap their question or prompt after they speak to each student.
Substitution drill
The teacher provides a sentence which students repeat. The teacher then provides something to be substituted into the sentence. The students change the sentence to accommodate the substitution. E.g.
T: I always go shopping on Tuesdays.
C: I always go shopping on Tuesdays.
T: Wednesday
C: I always go shopping on Wednesdays.
T: watch TV
C: I always watch TV on Wednesdays.
T: never
C: I never watch TV on Wednesdays.
Follow the word
This is based on the card game “follow the queen.” Write the words you want to drill on pieces of paper and tell students to repeat a few times. Turn the papers over and tell students to watch carefully as you move the papers around on the desk. Challenge them to say what is on each piece of paper.
Silent drill
The teacher says the sentence or the word to be drilled. Students mouth the sentence or word, but do not actually produce the sounds.
Transformation drill
The teacher drills a sentence in a particular form and tells the students to transform it to a different form e.g.
T: The police arrested a man.
C: The police arrested a man.
T: Passive
C: A man was arrested (by the police).
Disappearing drill
Put some words, phrases or a dialogue on the white board. Drill and then remove or cover some words. Continue to drill the missing words as you point at different parts of the board. Remove all the words until board is empty.
You will often find students can still remember every word even as you are pointing to an empty board!
Drama drills
Tell students to repeat the word or phrase with different emotions or use different intonation. For example, you could give students a sentence to say such as “I’ve got some news” and ask them to say it as though they are surprised, angry, disappointed or excited. You could then have the students in groups with one student in each group acting as the “director” and telling the rest of the group how to say the word or phrase.
C-G-I
When drilling, start Chorally (the whole class), then Groups and finally Individually. Choral drilling allows students to build confidence initially, whereas smaller groups and individual drilling allow you to hear where it might be going wrong, and also gives individuals a chance to perform.
Chain drill
The teacher asks a question which a student answers. The student then asks the next student a question of the same form. E.g.
T: What colour is the sea?
S1: The sea is blue. What colour is the book?
S2: The book is green. What colour is the pen?
This can also be used with sentences which the students modify.
T: You stole my wallet.
S1: I didn’t steal it. S2 stole it!
S2: I didn’t steal it. S3 stole it!
Mr Men Drilling
This is a variation of the mill drill described above. As well as giving students a prompt or question, give them a Mr Men (or Little Miss) character from the series of children’s books by Roger Hargreaves. Such characters may include Mr Angry or Little Miss Chatterbox. Students should take on this role as they complete the mill drill.
Tip: As with any activity, the key to making drilling interesting is to keep it meaningful, relevant, short and varied. Giving context helps to keep it meaningful, such as seeing the drilled words or phrases within a dialogue. Equally important, drilled items should be relevant to the students.
Materials
If you would like to read more about the TV show I based this idea on, you can read about Oryol & Reshka on Wikipedia or IMDb.
Full activity pack – includes procedures, templates, language exercises (including answers) and useful language list.
