Adapting and Writing Language Lessons/Chapter 8

by Earl W. Stevick

CHAPTER 8

ROUTINE MANIPULATIONS

It is only by constant reiteration that one can impress an alien concept upon a recalcitrant mind.

Anon.

Negative advertising has been with us at least since the days of 'No stoop, No Squat, No Squint,' and purveyors of $10.98 language courses have made a fortune from offering 'No Tiresome Drills!' and 'No Confusing Grammar Rules!' Whether drills are necessarily tiresome remains to be seen, but there can be little doubt that they are necessary. Even many cognitivists, although they do not emphasize drill to the same extent that the behaviorists do, are still willing to recognize a place for this kind of activity. Thus Kuno (1969): 'Whatever may be shown [through research] about pattern drill vs. true communication …, the student must still be induced to engage in such activities for any learning to take place.' Kniesner (1969) concurs. Rivers (1968) sees drills as being particularly suited for internalization of the 'closed systems' of a language. Bolinger (1968) quips that 'to imagine that drills are to be replaced by rule-giving is to imagine that digestion can be replaced by swallowing.' The reason why drills are so hard to get away from is that a language does not consist of sounds and words alone. It also has its stock of constructions and processes and rules. Just as a speaker must choose the right words for his purpose, and the right sounds to make them intelligible, so he must develop facility in putting them into appropriate grammatical settings. Consider the following English examples, which could be matched from any other language. The principal words are tank and leak.

Barely intelligible.	Clear and idomatic.
Tank leak.	The tank leaks.
	A tank is leaking.
	The tank is leaking.
Tank leak, no?	Is the tank leaking?
	The tank is leaking, isn't it?
	Does the tank leak?
	The tank leaks, doesn't it?
Tank no leak.	The Tank doesn't leak.
	The tank isn't leaking.
	The tank hasn't leaked yet.
	The tank won't leak.

As these examples show, grammatical inadequacy not only sounds funny; it often carries with it a certain amount of ambiguity.

But to say that drills are concerned with the teaching of constructions would not be an adequate statement of their function. A grammatical construction cannot be mastered by itself. A student may repeat one or more examples of the construction after the teacher, and he may see other examples of it in connected texts, and he still may not comprehend it completely. The study of grammar is the study of relationships, such as the contrast between This tank leaked and This tank has leaked. Any relationship has at least two terms, and the student will not internalize a relationship by practicing only of its terms. This is why Cummings devices (pp. 312-327), dialogs, and other kinds of basically textual material are by themselves inadequate. This is why we need systematic practice material, both drills and exercises.^[1] The essential nature of a drill, therefore, is threefold:

(1) The point on which it focusses, and the item which it repeats, is not a word or a construction, but a relationship between constructs. This relationship may be such that it can only be summarized by a transformational rule, or it may lend itself to summary in the shape of a simple substitution table, but it is still a relationship between constructs.

(2) These relationships are of a nature which keeps them from becoming the object of attention during dormal language use.

(3) No one of these relationships ordinarily gets repeated several times in a row in normal conversation, while the consecutive reiteration of such a relationship is essential to the successful completion of a drill.

For these reasons, it might be well to replace 'stimulus' (or 'cue') and 'response' as terms for the two halves of a line in a drill, calling them instead 'the first and second terms of the relationship' that the drill is about.

How and why drills work is a much-discussed question, which we considered in Chapter 1 (p. 19). Some authorities seem to believe that constant reiteration of samples of the desired effect of a neurological potential will produce that potential in the minds of their students. It is quite possible that students' minds do work this way, if only in self-defense. It may also be the case, however, that drills are valuable first for exploring and elucidating the relationships that they exemplify, and second in establishing a short-term memory of the relationship, which is then lengthened (Carroll in valdman 1966, p.99) by repeated real or realistic application (Chapter 2, pp. 29-31).

The two principal kinds of manipulative drill are substitution, which deals primarily with 'enate' relationships (Chapter 1, p. 12), and transformation, which deals with 'agnate' relationships. The purpose of a substitution drill is to let the student see and practice a large number of highly similar examples of a single construction:

Pattern sentence: I brought my camera.

New cue:	Expected response:
flashlight	I brought my flashlight.
raincoat	I brought my raincoat.
gloves	I brought my gloves.
homework	I brought my homework.
golf clubs	I brought my golf clubs.

Even in such a simple drill as this, considerations of realism (Assumption I) will encourage us to go beyond such old standby nouns as book, pen, pencil: the same considerations require us to use golf clubs or homework only with students who are likely to have golf clubs or homework that they sometimes carry around with them.

There are many other varieties of substitution drill.This is not the place to catalog them. One is 'substitution-correlation,' in which a change of a major word at one place in the sentence entails a grammatical change somewhere else.

Pattern sentence: I brought my camera.

New cue:	Expected response:
(John)	John brought his camera.
(Mary)	Mary brought her camera.
everyone	Everyone brought his camera.
some people	Some people brought their cameras.

Obviously, John and Mary stand respectively for the names of men and women known to the students.

Substitution—correlation drills lend themselves to practice of gender—number concords, as in the above example, to matching tenses of verbs with appropriate time expressions, to matching prepositions with the nouns, verbs or adjectives in a sentence, and so forth. Some important relationships, however, cannot be drilled in this way. For these relationships, transformation drills are needed.

Sample pair of sentences:

Do you go swimming every day?

No, but I went swimming yesterday.

Additional pairs of sentences:

Do you buy cigarettes every day?	No, but I bought cigarettes yesterday.
Do you eat breakfast every day?	No, but I ate breakfast yesterday.
Do you get mail every day?	No, but I got mail yesterday.

The purpose of this drill is of course to practice the single relationship which unites go with went, buy with bought, eat with ate and get with got.

A different kind of transformation drill combines two short sentences into a longer one:

Sample set of sentences:

Cue:	Expected response:
Some trainees got mail.|	The trainees who got mall were happy’
Some trainees were happy.

Additional sets:

Some people ate custard.	The people who ate custard got sick.
Some people got sick
Some people took the bus.	The people who took the bus were late.
Some people were late.
etc.

Again, one should try to keep from falling back on such clichés as:

Some students studied hard.	The students who studied hard got good grades.
Some students got good grades.

The design of drills is one thing; actually writing them for a permanent set of materials is quite another. What for one user are exactly enough drills on a given point are for a second user too many, and for a third user too few. The materials developer is certain only that he cannot please everybody. To some extent this problem can be eased by transferring to the user the responsibility for deciding how many drills there will be (Assumption IV). To do this, one must first make a very useful but seldom noted distinction between 'routine manipulations' and other manipulative drills. This distinction is based simply on the frequency, importance and difficulty of a distinction. These factors vary from language to language. In French, for example, the tag question n'est ce pas? is added to sentences about as often as the corresponding tag questions are used in English. Yet n'est ce pas? requires much less practice than is needed to master English isn't it?, won't it?, won't they?, can't I?, haven't you?, mustn't she? and so forth. On the other hand, changing from present to past tenses in the best-known European languages including English is troublesome: get, got, but set, set; sink, sank, but think, thought. In Swahili this difference is always made by replacing the prefix na by the prefix li. And in some languages, the verb doesn't change to show tense at all. A French speaker, whose definite and indefinite articles work something like the and a in English, will need less drill on these words than will a speaker of Russian, whose language lacks articles altogether.

A difficult manipulation which is however infrequent and relatively unimportant is the relationship between:

We waited four hours.	Seldom have we waited so long.
I ate fourteen pancakes.	Seldom have I eaten so many.

Points like this will not be made the subject of 'routine manipulation.' They are best handled by writing manipulative drills ahead of time, as is usually done in the preparation of language textbooks. Here is a three-step outline for conducting routine manipulations:

1. Decide what grammatical points are to be made the subjects of routine manipulation. In English, for speakers of most other languages, one might list the following:

a. Tense changes: he goes, he went, he has gone, etc.

b. Relative constructions: the speaker that we listened to most carefully, etc.

c. Negation: he can't sleep, he doesn't sleep, etc.

d. Tag questions: doesn't he? do they? won't I?, etc.

e. Prepositions: in (a city), on (a street), at {an address), etc.

f. Direct and indirect questions: When does he have to leave?, Ask him when he has to leave, etc.

g. Articles, mass/count nouns: I saw a key. I saw some charcoal. I saw Jacqueline.

2. Prepare a sample drill for each point in the above list. Some will require more than one drill, but the total number should not be more than 20. Three samples for English are:

TENSE DRILL

In stimulus sentence: 'Simple' form of a verb

In response sentence: 'Past participle' of the same verb

When will they go?	Haven't they gone yet?
When will they leave here?	Haven't they left here yet?
When will they catch the bus?	Haven't they caught the bus yet?
When will they get back?	Haven't they gotten back yet?

TENSE DRILL

In stimulus sentence: 'Past' form of a verb

In response sentence: 'Simple' form of the same verb

They went yesterday.	When did they go?
They left here yesterday.	When did they leave here?
They caught the bus yesterday.	When did they catch the bus?
They got back.	When did they get back?

PREPOSITION DRILL

As stimulus: An adjective

In the response: The same adjective with an appropriate preposition

interested	Are you interested in it?
dependent	Are you dependent on it?
independent	Are you independent of it?
worried	Are you worried about it?

3. Write a brief reminder of each of the sample drills. This is usually a single line from the drill:

When will they go?	Haven't they gone yet?
They went yesterday.	When did they go?
dependent	Are you dependent on it?

Assemble a complete set of these reminders, for all the routine manipulations. Affix a copy of this list to the wall of the classroom, or to the front of the instructor's notebook. (See Swahili example, p. 426.)

With a moderate amount of training, the instructor will be able to make up his own drills on these points, drawing his material from dialogs, stories, and other meaningful use of the language. Suppose for example, that the students have just finished working with an impromptu 'microtext' like the following:

The grocery store we buy groceries from is located about two blocks from our house. It has a well-stocked dairy counter and a well-stocked delicatessen counter. The food is well displayed, it's a nice, bright, light store; it has a very large parking lot; there's no trouble finding parking; it's located near other shops so that it makes--ah--general shopping easier. It's located in Bailey's Crossroads near the E. J. Korvette store there.

The instructor might improvise drills like these:

TENSE DRILL: 'simp1e verb' vs. 'past participle'.

When will they buy groceries?	Haven't they bought groceries yet?
When will they stock the counter?	Haven't they stocked it yet?
When will they display the food?	Haven't they displayed it yet?
When will they find parking?	Haven't they found it yet?

PREPOSITION DRILL:

E. J. Korvette Store	It's near the E. J. Korvette Store.
Bailey's Crossroads	It's in Bailey's Crossroads.
our house	It's two blocks from our house.
far	It's far from here.
our house and Bailey's Crossroads	It's between our house and Bailey's Crossroads.

Drills constructed on this basis are no longer an obstacle course which the student must climb through before he can get to meaningful discourse. Instead, they are offshoots from and buttresses for his experience with real use of the language.

1. A 'drill,' as the term is used here, is an activity which allows for only one correct response to a given stimulus: If the student is told to substitute the word pencil for {u|pen}} in the sentence I forgot my pen, then the only possible correct reply is I forgot my pencil. An 'exercise' allows the student some latitude. If the student is instructed to 'substitute some other noun for pen' in the above sentence, or if he is asked to make his own reply to the question 'What did you forget?' then he is doing an 'exercise.' (The need for texts and drills and exercises is one example of the principle of pluralism (Assumption V).)