ABSTRACT
One of the mainstays of second language teaching in the days of audio-lingualism was drills with frequent repetition of target structures. Considered a means of helping learners develop good language learning “habits,” these drills were led by teachers or an audiotaped stimulus to which students would respond on cue (Brown, 1994; DeKeyser, 1998; Hadley, 1993). In more recent theory (e.g., McLaughlin, 1987; Skehan, 1998) and teaching methods informed by cognitive psychology (Hadley, 1993; Skehan, 1998), the benefits of repetition are not viewed in terms of behaviorist habit formation. Rather, repetition is viewed as a way of providing learners greater access to language forms—for example, by repeating forms for learners (Chaudron, 1977)—and as a means of enabling learners to develop automaticity in the target language as they proceed from highly controlled language use to more automatic or spontaneous production of internalized forms. Indeed, the importance of having learners reproduce forms they have heard to help them notice gaps between their own and others’ production is underscored in several current accounts of language acquisition (see, e.g., Schmidt & Frota, 1986; Skehan, 1998, following Swain, 1985).
