The Use of a Computer in Drilling

Abstract

Although the classes met but twice a week for an hour each time, the instruction proved to be as fast and effective as the more normal schedule of four hours per week: the same amount of material was covered with students having from an average to an outstanding knowledge of their assignments. Part of the reason for that was the high motivation of students voluntarily learning another language, but another perhaps even more important factor was that much of the work normally done in class was accomplished, in this case, through the use of special programs written for a time-sharing computer. That proved to be an effective tool, allowing most of the time with an instructor to be devoted to teaching, rather than checking on the work of students. The reaction to the programs and the results they achieved suggest that in the not too distant future, as computers become more and more available, that kind of instruction will be seen in many other institutions. The main advantages of programs such as these is that they give each student highly individualized attention, correcting his work as he does it, allowing for typing mistakes, never teaching the same lesson twice in the exact same way, continually adapting to concentrate on what the student does not know and ignoring what he has mastered. Similar to the language laboratory, these programs take much of the drudgery away from instructors but also have the advantage of not boring students through making language work overly mechanized. Perhaps the easiest way to show how the various programs work is to describe how students go about using them.