Drilling

Drilling is controlled repetition of a target word, phrase or structure, led by the teacher, to build accuracy and automaticity in production. The teacher gives a model, learners repeat it chorally and then individually, and variations substitute one element at a time. Drilling shapes pronunciation and form; it does not by itself produce communication.

How drilling is used in practice

A drill has three moving parts: a model, a prompt and a response. The teacher supplies the model, gives a signal or a cue, and the learners produce the response. Because the response is fixed, or nearly fixed, the learner has almost no choice about what to say. That is the defining feature. The British Council puts it plainly in its guidance on the technique: in all drills learners have no or very little choice over what is said, so drills are a form of very controlled practice, there is one correct answer, and the focus is on getting it right.

That constraint is the point. It frees attention. A learner who is not deciding what to say can spend the whole of their attention on how to say it, which is exactly what a difficult consonant cluster or an unfamiliar stress pattern demands. It is also the technique’s limit, and the reason a lesson made only of drills produces learners who can perform sentences and not hold conversations.

The main types of drill

Type	What happens	What it is good for
Repetition drill	The teacher models a word or phrase and the learners say it back unchanged.	First contact with a new sound, chunk or stress pattern.
Choral drill	The whole class responds together.	Volume of practice, and cover for learners who are not yet confident enough to be heard alone.
Individual drill	One nominated learner responds.	Diagnosis. It is the only version in which the teacher can actually hear who has it.
Substitution drill	The teacher changes one cue each time and the learners adjust the response. Prompt: I go to work. He? Response: He goes to work.	Making a pattern flexible rather than memorised as a single lump.
Question and answer drill	The prompt is a question and the response is the answer, practising a common pair such as Can I have a pen please? and Yes, here you are.	Adjacency pairs, and the rhythm of a short exchange rather than a single line.
Back chaining	The teacher builds the phrase from the end: yesterday, then get up yesterday, then did you get up yesterday, then the whole question.	Long phrases whose intonation collapses when built from the front.

The substitution and question and answer examples above are the British Council’s own, taken from its Drilling 1 article and its teaching knowledge database entry for drill.

What is worth drilling, and what is not

Worth drilling	Why	Example
Sounds absent from the learners’ first language	The mouth has never made the shape before and needs physical practice, not explanation.	The two th sounds in think and this.
Consonant clusters	Many languages break clusters with an extra vowel, and the habit survives long after the grammar is secure.	Strengths, asked, clothes.
Weak forms and linking	Learners who have only met the written form say every word in full and sound laboured.	A cup of tea, where of almost disappears.
Word and sentence stress	Stress carries more of the listener’s understanding than individual sounds do.	Comfortable and vegetable, both shorter than they look.
Intonation that changes meaning	The same words mean different things depending on the contour, and this cannot be taught on paper.	A tag question asking for confirmation against one that is a genuine question.
High frequency chunks	Fixed expressions are stored and retrieved whole, so automaticity is worth buying.	If I were you, I would, Have you got a.

The other half of that list matters as much. The British Council’s guidance is explicit that drilling structures for their own sake is much less likely to be useful, because applying a grammar rule accurately takes mental processing that repetition does not supply, particularly when the language is new. A class can chant the third conditional faultlessly and still fail to produce it when they need it, and every experienced teacher has watched exactly that happen.

A worked classroom example

An A2 class of eighteen adults in a general English course. The target is a single functional phrase they will need from their first week in an English speaking workplace: Could you say that again, please? The difficulty is not the words. It is that could you runs together into something closer to one syllable, and that the phrase needs a polite rising contour rather than the flat delivery learners default to when reading.

Move	What the teacher does	Why this move and not another
1	Sets a situation before saying the phrase at all. She mimes a bad phone line, says something deliberately inaudible, and lets the class see the problem.	Meaning has to come before repetition. The British Council’s phrasing is that monotonous chanting of decontextualised language is not useful to anyone, and a class that does not know why it is saying something will say it badly.
2	Models the phrase twice at natural speed, with nothing written on the board.	The written form is the enemy here. Learners who see could you will say two full words. Withholding the text for ninety seconds is the single cheapest way to protect the pronunciation.
3	Back chains it: please, then again please, then say that again please, then the whole question, choral each time.	Built from the front, the phrase runs out of energy and the ending goes flat. Built from the end, the contour is right from the first repetition and never has to be corrected.
4	Choral, then half the room, then three nominated individuals. Total elapsed time under two minutes.	Choral repetition builds volume and hides the nervous. Individual repetition is the only part that tells the teacher anything, so it has to happen, and it has to be brief enough that nobody is on display for long.
5	Moves straight into a pair dictation in which the speaker is told to mumble on purpose, so the listener has a genuine reason to use the phrase.	This is the move most often skipped, and skipping it is what makes drilling look useless. Without a task that needs the phrase, it remains a noise the class can make on command and nowhere else.

Two things carry the example. The first is that the drill lasted under two minutes. The British Council’s advice is to keep drilling snappy and to stop before boredom sets in, on the grounds that a bored drill is unlikely to be useful at all. The second is move five. A drill with no transfer stage is the version of the technique that gave drilling its poor reputation, and the fix costs one activity.

Commonly confused

Pair	The distinction that matters
Drilling vs eliciting	They run in opposite directions. In eliciting the teacher gives a prompt and the learners supply the language. In drilling the teacher supplies the language and the learners supply the repetition. A lesson often does both in sequence: elicit the phrase, then drill it.
Drilling vs repetition	All drilling is repetition; not all repetition is drilling. Drilling is repetition organised around a teacher model and a deliberate target. A learner rereading a text aloud is repeating, but nobody is shaping what comes out.
Drilling vs controlled practice	Drilling is one kind of controlled practice, the oral and immediate kind. A gap fill exercise is also controlled practice and is not a drill. The distinction is useful when a lesson plan says controlled practice and the trainee assumes it means twenty minutes of chanting.
Drilling vs the audiolingual method	A technique against a whole method. Audiolingualism was built almost entirely out of drills and has been largely abandoned; drilling survived the method that overused it, in the way that a tool outlives a fashion for using only that tool.
Drilling vs back chaining	Back chaining is not a rival to drilling, it is a way of doing one. Trainees sometimes list them as alternatives on a lesson plan, which signals that the plan has not been thought through.
Drilling vs choral reading	Choral reading works from a written text in front of the learners, so it practises decoding as much as pronunciation. A choral drill usually works from the teacher’s voice with the text hidden, which is why it produces different, and for pronunciation purposes better, results.

Where drilling came from, and why it fell out of favour

Drilling as a systematic classroom procedure belongs to the audiolingual method, which grew out of intensive wartime language programmes in the United States and was codified at the University of Michigan by Charles Fries and his colleagues in the years after 1945. Its two supports were structural linguistics, which treated a language as an inventory of patterns, and behaviourist psychology, which treated language learning as habit formation through stimulus, response and reinforcement. If a language was a set of habits, then drilling those habits to the point of automatic production was not one technique among many. It was the whole curriculum.

The theoretical support gave way first. Noam Chomsky’s 1959 review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior argued that habit formation could not account for the fact that speakers routinely produce and understand sentences they have never heard, and the field moved on. The British Council’s own summary of the position is blunt: the behaviourist view held that repeating phrases correctly enough times would lead to mastery, we now know language learning is not like this, and an approach based mainly or only on language drills is unlikely to find many adherents today.

What did not follow, and what the more careless version of this history gets wrong, is that drilling itself was disproved. The method was abandoned. The technique was demoted. The British Council’s same guidance goes on to say that drilling remains a useful technique in the classroom if it is used appropriately, and in practice it never left: teachers who would describe their approach as communicative still drill a difficult phrase before a role play, because it works for that job.

What the research actually supports

The honest position is that the evidence for repetition is strongest where drilling’s defenders now place it, on pronunciation and on the automaticity of fixed forms, and weakest where audiolingualism placed it, on grammatical competence. A study by Jung, Kim and Murphy in Studies in Second Language Acquisition in 2017 tested this with fifty seven Korean high school learners across three groups over four weeks, measuring the production of English word stress patterns. Both repetition conditions improved accuracy, and for longer term retention repeating the same task with the same content twice beat repeating the procedure with different content. That is a narrow finding about lexical stress and priming tasks rather than a general endorsement of drills, and it should be read as such, but it points the same way as classroom experience: repeated production of the same target does shape how learners say things.

The claim that drilling builds the ability to communicate has no comparable support, and the page makes no such claim. Pronunciation notation is a useful companion here, and the Group’s global reference on it sits on the International Phonetic Alphabet for English teachers. For activity level treatment of the same ground in a European classroom, see TEFL.ie’s pronunciation activities for European English teachers.

References

Four of the sources below were fetched and confirmed reachable on 23 September 2026 and carry links. The remainder are standard published works cited bibliographically, without links, because no stable open source for them was verified.

Source	What it supports here
British Council TeachingEnglish, Drilling 1	The definition of controlled practice, the behaviourist origin, what to drill and when, and the warning about decontextualised chanting.
British Council TeachingEnglish, Drilling 2	Back chaining, varying who repeats, keeping the pace snappy, and the closing rule to drill only language that benefits from it.
British Council TeachingEnglish, Teaching knowledge database: drill	Choral and substitution drills, the worked substitution sequence, and the standard objection that drilling is teacher centred.
Jung, Y., Kim, Y. and Murphy, J. (2017), The Role of Task Repetition in Learning Word-Stress Patterns through Auditory Priming Tasks, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 39(2), 319 to 346	The measured effect of task repetition on the production of English word stress, and the advantage of repeating content rather than only procedure.
Richards, J. C. and Schmidt, R. (2010), Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, 4th edition	The standard reference definitions of drill, substitution drill and pattern practice.
Fries, C. C. (1945), Teaching and Learning English as a Foreign Language, University of Michigan Press	The structural basis of pattern practice and the Michigan codification of the approach.
Skinner, B. F. (1957), Verbal Behavior; and Chomsky, N. (1959), review of Verbal Behavior, Language, 35(1), 26 to 58	The behaviourist account of language as habit, and the critique that removed its theoretical support.
Scrivener, J. (2011), Learning Teaching, 3rd edition; Harmer, J. (2015), The Practice of English Language Teaching, 5th edition	Standard teacher training treatment of drilling stages, nomination and correction.
Thornbury, S. (2006), An A to Z of ELT; Lightbown, P. M. and Spada, N. (2021), How Languages are Learned, 5th edition	The place of drilling in current terminology, and the wider evidence on practice and second language acquisition.

Frequently asked questions

What is drilling in teaching English?

Drilling is controlled repetition of a target word, phrase or structure, led by the teacher, to build accuracy and automaticity in production. The teacher gives a model, learners repeat it chorally and then individually, and variations substitute one element at a time. It is a classroom technique rather than a method, and it can be used within almost any approach to teaching.

What are the main types of drill?

The common types are repetition drills, in which learners say back an unchanged model; choral drills, in which the whole class responds together; individual drills, in which one nominated learner responds; substitution drills, in which the teacher changes one cue each time; and question and answer drills, which practise a short exchange rather than a single line. Back chaining, building a phrase from its final word backwards, is a way of running any of these rather than a separate type.

Is drilling still used in modern language teaching?

Yes, though in a much smaller role than it had under the audiolingual method. The British Council’s position is that an approach based mainly or only on drills is unlikely to find many adherents today, but that drilling remains a useful technique when used appropriately. In practice most communicative classrooms still drill, usually briefly and usually for pronunciation, before learners use the language in a freer task.

What should teachers drill, and what should they not drill?

Drill what causes trouble in the mouth: sounds absent from the learners’ first language, consonant clusters, weak forms and linking, word and sentence stress, meaningful intonation patterns, and high frequency fixed chunks. Drilling grammatical structures for their own sake is much less productive, because applying a rule accurately requires mental processing that repetition does not provide, particularly when the language is new to the class.

How long should a drilling stage last?

There is no established figure, and any source offering one is guessing. The usable guidance is qualitative: keep the pace snappy, vary who repeats, and stop before the class loses interest, because a drill that has become boring is unlikely to be doing any good. In most lessons this means a stage measured in a small number of minutes rather than a block of the lesson.

What is the difference between drilling and eliciting?

The two techniques move in opposite directions. In eliciting the teacher supplies a prompt and the learners supply the language, which reveals what the class already knows. In drilling the teacher supplies the language and the learners supply the repetition, which shapes how accurately they can produce it. They are complementary rather than alternative, and a well built presentation stage often elicits a phrase first and then drills it.

Related entries in this glossary

Drilling sits inside the practice stage of a lesson, so it is best read alongside presentation, practice, production, which is the framework that gives the drill its place in a lesson shape. It is also teacher fronted by design, which makes it a recurring item in any discussion of teacher talking time versus student talking time, where the useful question is not how much the teacher speaks but what the speaking is doing. The comfort of choral repetition, and why exposed individual repetition can backfire, is covered in the entry on the affective filter. The full set of twenty terms is in the TEFL teaching methods and classroom techniques glossary.

Last updated 23 September 2026. Written by Katie Troy for tefl.ai. External sources were checked and confirmed reachable on 23 September 2026.