My Fulbright Year in Taiwan

This morning I gave a seminar on integrating teaching and listening into language lessons. When we were talking about practicing sentence patterns as part of a language lesson, I asked the teachers how they teach the pattern. They said that they go over the pattern, then drill it as a whole class, in groups, with partners, until the students “get” it.

I told them that this approach, called “drill and practice,” has been renamed “drill and kill” in the US. They thought that was kind of funny. I was a bit surprised that they hadn’t heard that term before. Maybe now that they know the new name, they will be motivated to seek alternative ways to practice grammar?