Earl W. Stevick

“ ROUTINE MANIPULATIONS
It is only by constant reiteration that one can impress an alien concept upon a recalcitrant mind.
Anon. Negative advertising has been with us at least since the days of 'No stoop, No Squat, No Squint,' and purveyors of $10.98 language courses have made a fortune from offering 'No Tiresome Drills!' and 'No Confusing Grammar Rules!' Whether drills are necessarily tiresome remains to be seen, but there can be little doubt that they are necessary. ”

“ But to say that drills are concerned with the teaching of constructions would not be an adequate statement of their function. A grammatical construction cannot be mastered by itself. A student may repeat one or more examples of the construction after the teacher, and he may see other examples of it in connected texts, and he still may not comprehend it completely. ”

“ The design of drills is one thing; actually writing them for a permanent set of materials is quite another. What for one user are exactly enough drills on a given point are for a second user too many, and for a third user too few. The materials developer is certain only that he cannot please everybody. To some extent this problem can be eased by transferring to the user the responsibility for deciding how many drills there will be (Assumption IV) . To do this, one must first make a very useful but seldom noted distinction between 'routine manipulations' and other manipulative drills. ”