Study 12: Audiolingual pattern drill
In the late 1970s, Pastsy Lightbown (1983a, b) carried out a series of longitudinal and cross-sectional investigations into the effect of audio lingual instruction on interlanguage development. The investigations focused on French-speaking learners aged 11-16 in Quebec, Canada. Students in these programmers typically participated in the types of rote repetition and pattern practice drill we saw in Examples 1 and 2.
The learners’ acquisition of certain English grammatical morphemes (for example, plural- s and the progressive –ing). The results showed differences between the ‘natural order’ and the relative accuracy with which these classroom learners produced them. For example,students usually supplied both the auxiliary be and the –ing ending (for example, ‘He’s playing ball’). However, they also produced one or more of the morphemes in places where they did not belong (‘He’ want a cookie’). These findings provided evidence that an almost exclusive focus on accuracy and practice of particular grammatical forms. This instruction that depended on repetition and drill of decontextualized sentences –did not seem to favour the development of comprehension, fluency, or communicative abilities either.