The Controlled Practice Stage

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Current coursebooks contain far fewer controlled practice activities than were used at the beginning of the Communicative era. These days most controlled practice is generally found in the workbook, which is often used as homework for consolidation rather than incorporated into the lesson as in a PPP approach. This article is based on material originally used on our Delta Module One course. It looks at how useful it is - or isn't - to incorporate controlled practice activities into your lesson format.

Look at the following quotes from two teachers.

Teacher A: 
Controlled practice? Does anybody do that any more? I never do. It’s too
mechanical and boring.

Teacher B:  For me,
the controlled practice stage is essential if students are going to assimilate
the language properly.

The article below discusses the following questions.

a. What beliefs inform
attitudes such as those made by the two teachers in the quotes above?

b. What types of
controlled practice activities could Teacher A use that would not be
“mechanical and boring”

c. With what
learner types and/or in what learning contexts might it be beneficial to use controlled practice activities

 

a) The beliefs of the two teachers

Teacher A may believe that …

• controlled
  practice (CP), particularly in the form of drilling, is associated with a
  theory of learning which is outdated, and therefore the technique is itself
  outdated. Behaviourism (Skinner), which was the
  learning theory underlying audiolingualism,  claimed that there was no cognitive
  involvement in learning but that learning took place through a
  stimulus-response-reinforcement process which led to habit formation. This view
  was first attacked by Chomsky, who pointed out that there must be a
  neurological mechanism involved as, if Skinner were correct, a) children would
  take much longer than they do to acquire language and b) animals would also be
  able to acquire language.

• grammatical
  competence can best be acquired if the learners are engaged throughout in
  meaning-focused activity.  (Prabhu).  CP,
  which generally does not involve learners in constructing their own meanings, impedes
  rather than aids this acquisition.

• if learners get
  bored with CP, the negative affect will have a detrimental effect on their
  learning. Many psychologists, educationalists and EFL methodologists have made
  this point (Maslow, Stevick, Lozanov, Krashen, etc).

• language
  cannot be learnt but only “acquired” and acquisition is a subconscious process,
  unaffected by conscious focus on and manipulation of language items. It is,
  instead, dependent on exposure to “roughly tuned input” (Krashen). CP, which is
  learning oriented, is irrelevant to this process.

• language
  cannot be learnt but only “acquired” and that acquisition is dependent on
  negotiation of meaning (Swain). Meaning is “negotiated” when the learner
  attempts to say something, fails to get their meaning across, and has to
  reformulate and find the correct form in order to do so. This process promotes
  the “noticing” that is necessary for acquisition. CP, which aims to prevent
  this sort of inaccuracy /lack of comprehension, will not therefore promote the
  acquisition of the structure.

 

Teacher B may believe that …

• learners will
  be overloaded if asked to express meaning through the new structure before they
  have fully assimilated it. This overload will result in inaccuracy which, because
  it promotes the formation of “bad” habits and impedes the formation of correct
  ones, is to be avoided  (behaviourism/audiolingualism)

• this overload
  will also lead to confusion. They will learn best if there is a systematic
  progression in communicative challenge throughout the lesson:  Presentation – Controlled Practice – Semi-controlled
  practice – Free practice. This gradual
  increase in difficulty was the basis of the Presentation- Practice - Production
  approach but is compatible with other lesson formats – eg Test – Teach – Test.
  Even Dogme (which rejects the idea of a graded syllabus but focuses on language
  “emerging” from the Ls’ attempts to communicate) emphasises the need for CP of
  the language which is focused on. Thornbury and Meddings (2009:20) suggest that emergent language, after being retrieved can be drilled : "Drilling something has the effect of making it stand out from all the other things that happen in a language lesson",

• This gradual approach gives
  the Ls the chance to see more examples of the language item and to reflect on
  them before they are asked to use it to
  communicate their own ideas, which involves a higher degree of communicative
  challenge. This would
  suit learners with a Reflector learning style (Honey and Mumford)

• The overload and confusion mentioned
  above will also lead to demotivation and therefore negative affect . As already stated, many
  psychologists, educationalists and EFL methodologists have pointed to the
  harmful effect of negative affect on learning. (Maslow, Stevick, Lozanov,
  Krashen, etc)

• CP will give
  extra opportunities for “noticing” after the language focus stage, so that
  there is less chance of the learner confusing the TL with previously learnt
  items and eg overgeneralising. In contrast to
  Krashen, who saw acquisition as a subconscious process,  Schmidt saw  “noticing” (ie conscious focus on
  and analysis of the language item) as essential if language was to be acquired.

• CP aids
  automaticity in the production of the TL, and this automaticity will increase
  fluency. For example, beginner learners who have done choral and individual
  repetition of  My names XXX / I’m (nationality) will have learnt the utterances as
  “chunks” making them easier to retrieve and use in actual communication.

b) Controlled practice activities that are not “mechanical and boring”?

• repetition
  drills can be made less boring by asking
  students to add eg emotions – to say the sentence as if angry, sad, happy etc –
  or to whisper/shout/laugh it etc. This can be
  particularly useful at intermediate levels, where repetition work might
  otherwise be seen as too “easy” by the Ls.

• all types of
  CP activity can be made less mechanical, and
  often more interesting, if picture prompts are used instead of written prompts
  – the learners then have to think of some of the language for themselves rather
  than just parroting what they are given (though the language produced is still 100% controlled
  by the contents of the pictures). It also shows that they understand the
  meaning of what they are saying.

• all types of controlled
  practice activity can be made more meaningful and
  less mechanical and boring by personalising them – eg the Ss use the TL to write 5 sentences
  about themselves.

• drills may be made communicative  by contextualising them and/or including an
  information gap  – eg
  if the TL is clock times or the simple present for timetabled events , St. A
  can have train times which St. B has to ask for (What time does the train for Leeds leave/arrive?) while St. B has
  entertainment times that St. A has to ask for (What time does the film start/finish?). Ss thus have to listen to note down the response.

• a
  conversation-driven approach does not preclude CP. The T. can monitor, and in
  feedback,  focus on errors and other
  emergent language, and provide “on the spot” controlled practice (repetition
  work, transformation activities) etc using a “Demand High” approach. As this is the
  language that the learners have tried to produce themselves, it should be less
  “mechanical and boring” for them.

c) With what learner types and/or in what learning contexts
might it be beneficial to use controlled practice activities?

•  Learners with a serialist learning style, who would appreciate the gradual increase in
  challenge that a PPP sequence would provide. Serialist learners
  (Pask) prefer working systematically one step at a time, and focusing narrowly
  on the specific material being studied.

• Weaker learners who
  would suffer most from overload if they were asked to use the language in a
  communicative context too soon, without sufficient prior focus and CP.  I have often found
  it useful to keep them at the at the CP stage for longer than the other
  learners, differentiating activities so that stronger learners move on to
  SCP/FP activities earlier, while the weaker learners do more CP.

• Complete beginners who
  will not have sufficient language at their disposal to take part in freer and
  more communicatively challenging activities.  I have found that they can often gain the feeling of having simulated
  “real” communication by using the technique of first using a short dialogue for
  repetition work, then showing it on the board and getting them to practise it
  repeatedly in pairs while the teacher gradually erases more and more words
  until they are doing it entirely from memory.

• Learners who were fluent but not accurate would benefit from reviewing the language they
  already “half knew” and focusing on accuracy oriented CP activities. This might help eg intermediate learners who were starting to show
  evidence of fossilised errors.

• Very large classes, where
  it would be impossible for the teacher to monitor all the students individually
  when doing free practice. Written CP activities would allow the T. to check the
  answers of all the Ls in full class mode, while stronger and more confident Ls could be
  asked to perform spoken CP activities for the class after PW practice, thus
  letting the whole class compare their own production to the model that the
  strong Ls provide.

Reference

Meddings, L. and Thornbury,  S. (2009) Teaching Unplugged  Delta Publishing