The Effect of Mechanical and Meaningful Drills on the Acquisition of Comparative and Superlative Adjectives

Abstract

This study tested the hypothesis of the superiority of meaningful drills over mechanical drills in teaching comparative and superlative adjectives to high school students. A convenience sample of 84 male high school freshmen took part in this study. They were matched based on their pre-test scores and constituted the control and experimental groups, 42 in each group. The participants in the control group received mechanical drills while their counterparts in the experimental group received meaningful drills for presentation and practice of intended grammatical points. One week later, both groups took a post-test containing 20 multiple-choice items under two categories of mechanical and meaningful subscales. The results of the independent samples t-test revealed a statistically significant difference between the groups, t (82) =-2.53, p = .013, indicating that meaningful drills resulted in better achievement than mechanical drills. The results of the paired-sample t-test also showed that those learners who received mechanical drills performed poorly on meaningful subscale of the post-test, t (41) = 3.35, p = .002, while for those who received meaningful drills no significant difference was observed between their performances on the mechanical and meaningful subscales , t (41) =-1.31, p = .19. Based on the results, it is concluded that inserting meaning into form realized in meaningful drills not only has no extra burden on EFL learners but also results in better acquisition of linguistic forms.

The Effectiveness of a Proposed Program Integrating Focus on Form and Gamified Learning in Fostering Egyptian English Majors' Phrasal Verbs Comprehension and Production

“…In meaningful drills, EFL learners are required to process the meaning of given written or spoken texts without producing their own ideas whereas communicative drills place more cognitive load on EFL learners as they necessitate expressing their own points of views, ideas and emotions. Thus, while meaningful drills establish EFL learners' declarative knowledge of target linguistic forms, communicative drills result in procedural knowledge, automaticity and mastery of the target linguistic items (Mohamed, 2006;Khodamoradi & Khaki, 2012;Alqahtani, 2019).…”

Meaningful Drills and Contextualized Reading Passages to Understand Relative Clauses

“…The same conclusion was also reached by Aini, Khoyimah and Santoso (2020) who prove that repetition drills are effective in improving the speaking abilities of students. Khodamoradi and Khaki (2012) who were testing the superiority of meaningful drills over mechanical drills concluded that the use of meaningful drills leads to better acquisition of language forms. This conclusion is highly significant as it shows the usefulness of meaningful drills in understanding language patterns.…”

Teaching Structure-Based Drills and Communicative Drills at the Primary Education in the Efl Settings

“…Instead of explaining the proper vocabulary used in drills and at what level of their improvement comes to promote their competence, the researcher only described the improvement of the pre-test and post-test scores in three cycles. On the other hand, Khodamoradi and Khaki (2012) had been also researched the effect of mechanical drills and meaningful drills on the grammar acquisition of foreign language learners. The result showed that the meaningful drill was over than the mechanical drill to acquire grammar since the meaningful drill leads them to have a higher cognitive process and better acquisition in internalizing the form.…”