May I suggest, Michael, that whenever confronted by anyone claiming that 
'best practice' proves something or other, it would be worthwhile asking 
him/her to ask for the reference for the related publication detailing the 
study.

I suspect that you will receive no substantive reply and this, because 
frequently, teachers who buy into the latest 'fad' are repeating the latest 
dogma, mantra-like, without having investigated and evaluated the related 
research.

Further, when anyone uses the term 'drills', it is essential to have them 
define what they mean by the term.   As I have already mentioned elsewhere, 
if 'drills' is being used to characterise an activity involving no thinking, 
there is empirical evidence to demonstrate that in terms of language 
learning, it has no effect on cognition.  (I have forgotten the details but 
the authors are Selinker and Lamendella).  Whenever I encounter the word 
'drills', I tend to assume it means mindless repetition but I suppose that 
this is not necessarily the case.

As to 'isolated', this is a red herring that was exploited in the 90s in 
ESL.  What teacher today would attempt to teach any aspect of grammar 
without putting it into practice in some way?

Ron Sheen
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Kischner" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2007 2:32 PM
Subject: "Infiltration" vs. "isolated drills"


This will be old hat to many readers of this list, but I have to unload.

I've volunteered to tutor at my local public middle school.
Yesterday, I went to meet a seventh-grade teacher who said she might
be able to use me in her classroom.   Before talking to her, I sat and
observed a reading lesson she taught.  First the class looked at a
list of "think aloud strategies" strategies for readers and checked
off the ones they use.  Then the lesson turned to one of those
strategies -- "visualizing." The teacher read to the class out of a
Gary Soto book while they followed along in their own copies and then
asked them to talk about things they visualized as they listened to
the passage.  Next they read silently  for twenty-five minutes in
whatever books they were currently reading and wrote down some of the
things they visualized.  It was a well-run class in which most of the
kids remained fairly well engaged.

After class, there was time only for a five-minute conversation with
the teacher.  I said that I would like to tutor especially in the
subjects of writing and language.

"Language?" the teacher asked.

"Sentence structure, for instance," I replied.  "I don't know if you
do anything specific with that."

"Well," the teacher said, "we usually infiltrate those topics into the
actual writing instruction.  Best practices show that drills and such
don't work with seventh graders."

I went home depressed.  So the choice is between "infiltrating" work
on sentence structure – people my age associate the word with the
Vietcong --  and "drills."  How much work we still have to do if many
teachers think those are the only alternatives!

Note that the teacher had just taught a lesson on "visualizing," a
sub-skill of reading.  She didn't rely only on "infiltrating" it ad
hoc into reading instruction.  She thought it worth spending a
dedicated hour on, and she put it into the framework of other reading
strategies.  "Framework" is the word Martha Kolln used in her ATEG
2006 keynote, in which she argued so forcefully that the mini-lesson
proposed by many grammar-in-context proponents can be as "isolated" as
the drills many of these proponents have in mind when they decry
"teaching grammar in isolation."

So we still confront the uphill battle of persuading teachers that
systematic grammar instruction does not mean drills, does not mean
isolation.  I don't know if I'll ever have a chance to make the case
with the teacher I met yesterday.  She was supposed to email me about
days she could use me, and I haven't heard from her yet!

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