The Usefulness of Choral Response and Repetition in the EFL Classroom

Okay, this sounds instantly boring, but it is an important issue in the EFL classroom, or any language classroom for that matter.

A untrained newbie teacher questioned in an email:

Isn’t “listen and repeat” over and over again demeaning? It is like we are treating our students like robots, not like real people.

NO! It is not!

To some extent I can understand the reluctance to do mechanical drill in the classroom. BUT anyone one of you (and me too) who have seriously studied a foreign language before KNOWS how important it is. You will especially understand if you have lived abroad and tried to learn the local language. And the more the language is different from yours the more choral response (the classroom listens to you or a recording and repeats what they hear) and repetition help.

Here’s what happens, and to illustrate I am telling you what happens to ME when I study a language, this is not just theory. This is real language learning. Often the first time someone says something it sounds like pure gibberish to me. The second time, I get a little bit of it. The third time I start to get most of it, the fourth time I might have the whole thing – might understand it and the fifth time, I might get a bit of the stress and rhythm of it.

That is SIX repetitions. Yet, I often need every single one of them to help me learn to repeat back a sentence correctly. And even then, should I stop repeating it because I finally got it right? Or should I repeat if a few more times to check it against the teacher’s model to be SURE I have it right and to build a patten of success?

Rethink this idea of repetition and choral response NOT being useful.  I know some people have a resistance to old styles of teaching where students repeat the mindless babble of an instructor, but language learning is a different animal.

TED’s Tips™ #1: Help your students be successful by using “listen and repeat” drills.  It is a critical part of language learning.  Choral response lets us make our mistakes in group where no one will hear it!  And there are lots of other mistakes going on too.

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1 Comment

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  By Tim Gilroy, June 14, 2011 @ 8:05 am

  YES!!!

  totally agree, Ted. And the students like it too. Because they can FEEL they are getting better in real time. If you think your students will baulk at such a “childish” way of learning (I teach undergraduate engineering students, so I used to suffer from these insecurities).. well they won’t! so long as the activity is presented with confidence and no alternative and EVERYBODY is doing it. You’ll find they don’t want to stop.

  And repetition doesn’t just need to be banal phrases. You can, with a bit of work, get your students to memorise an entire paragraph and repeat it several times:

  1) write a paragraph on the board, or project it on the screen in Word or similar (the paragraph might be a short anecdote, an essay paragraph, a process description; whatever…)

  2) read it aloud and get the students to read it in unison with you a couple of times

  3) erase some non-essential words (articles, prepositions?…) then get your students to read the paragraph again (NB, make a short line to indicate missing words, so you can “conduct” the repetition, pointing at the blanks)

  4) erase some more words, just leaving key lexis nouns and go thru the process again…

  5) finish with a board full of blanks and (hopefully) the students repeating the entire paragraph…

  sounds awful doesn’t it? But believe me they’ll go for it and they’ll thank you forever for getting them to memorise a useful paragraph (and speak it without feeling self-conscious)

  If you’re not convinced at their enthusiasm… revisit the paragraph a week later and “test” them on it…

  TG

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