A Place for (fun) Drills in the Proficiency Based Classroom?

"It's virtually impossible to become proficient at a

mental task without extended practice."

-Daniel Willingham in Why Don't Students Like School?

If you are a language teacher and you haven't been living under a rock, then you know all about the importance of proficiency, authentic language use, and comprehensible input? You might even think that all that talk means that drills have gone to the wayside. After all, what is authentic about repeating a verb conjugation 10 times in in a row? However, brain research will tell us that there is still an importance place in learning for drilling.

Daniel Willingham explains that drilling helps students "lighten their cognitive load" and frees up more space in the working memory for them to practice other skills. For example, novice students might be trying to talk to their partners about what they like to eat and why: they have to think about what foods they like, remember the words in Spanish, recall the pronunciation for the words in Spanish, know what the word order is, know how to agree their adjective with their food word, think to ask a follow-up question, and then actually put all of that together to say the sentences to their partner. This is not even going into the minutia of any other details that task required: do they have picture prompts, are they supposed to pretend to be other people with other preferences, etc. Now, imagine that they have already committed the verb conjugation for Gustar to memory, and they have mastered an easy follow-up questions like ¿y tú? and they already memorized their food vocabulary, then they have freed up space to be able to focus on other skills.

In order to get to that place however, some drilling, a scary word for the act of memorizing through repetition, must have taken place. In the modern language classroom, teachers have to create opportunities for students to "lighten their cognitive loads" by moving things from their working memory to long term memory through repetition. On her blog, Gretchen Schmelzer says "Repetition creates long term memory by eliciting or enacting strong chemical interactions at the synapse of your neuron (where neurons connect to other neurons). Repetition creates the strongest learning—and most learning—both implicit (like tying your shoes) and explicit (multiplication tables) relies on repetition." But how to make repetition work in the proficiency classroom? And how to make it fun? Here are 5 different ways:

1. Repeat it in a game with authentic gaming vocabulary. Check out our Rock and Roll Games to drill different verbs and vocabulary (present tense, imperfect tense, basic vocabulary Spanish, basic vocabulary French)

2. Repeat it through a song

3. Repeat it through conversation cards

4. Repeat it with gestures (TPR)

5. Repeat it with posters

REPEAT REPEAT REPEAT and have fun!