Repetition with purpose: More than just doing it again

by Pilar Capaul

Novelty and innovation keep the language classroom interesting for both teachers and students – so it’s no wonder that so many articles in journals such as this consider novelties and innovative practice. But one of the most effective ways to push our students to improve their language performance is repetition – doing the same task multiple times. In this article we’ll look at ways to make repetition work for us – and our students!

Writing

Raise your hand if this sounds familiar. A student produces a piece of writing (following a rubric, of course); they hand in their work; you spend time going through it, preparing feedback across a broad range of assessment criteria; you return the work to the student; they thank you, but then put the work and the feedback straight in their bag; they then approach the next piece of writing in exactly the same way, making all the same mistakes as last time, and you find yourself like Sisyphus rolling out all the same feedback as before.

Some of us ask for a second draft, but when our students fail to deliver this to us – usually with the excuse that they didn’t have the time – we move on with the lesson.

Some students genuinely do want to improve their writing skills, but in exam classes, where there are so many different genres of writing to explore, it could be that the feedback you gave on the student’s Letter doesn’t apply to their Report or their Article (or so they think!), and so it is forgotten despite everyone’s good intentions. The problem is that the request for a second draft doesn’t strike anyone as serious (and here I am speaking from experience!). Our students are used to expecting something new, one might even say novel, and so when we ask them for the same thing again, they imagine that we’re only saying it to tick a box in our lesson plan.

What we need to do is to sell our students on the repetition, and to do that we need to make it clear precisely what we want, and how it will help them to produce a better piece of writing next time.

Here are some ways that the student can take their existing work, repeat some aspects of the writing process, and come out with a better understanding of how to produce effective writing every time.

• Prepare a brief presentation for the class that summarises some of your feedback (the student could describe what they did before, reflect on your feedback, and suggest a new approach for next time).
• Rewrite one paragraph of their work, and post this on a sheet of paper along with the original paragraph around the room. If there are enough examples like this from different students, you can then run a discussion mingle, with students moving around the room in pairs, reflecting on the difference between the first and second attempts.
• Put students into teams to discuss one element of your feedback. One group could look at the effective use of cohesive devices, another could look at the importance of good spelling, and so forth. Each group gives a short presentation on their area of interest, or you could reassemble the groups so that one member of each team forms a new team, and they can share their ideas together that way.
• Ask each student to make a list of three things they need to remember for the next time they do a piece of writing – and ask them to attach this list to their next submission. Use the list as your primary form of assessment – did the student accomplish what they set out to do?

These approaches shift the focus from merely “fixing mistakes” to understanding how revisions improve writing quality. Ultimately, repetition in writing isn’t just about writing more or reviewing drafts, but about truly internalising improvements.

Reading

When we work on reading, we often revisit the same text multiple times, i.e. we read for gist, for detail, for language, etc.

But do our students read the same way over and over again?

To help students be aware of the importance of reading strategies, we can encourage reflection by using guiding questions; for example, after a gist-reading activity, students can answer the following:

• What was your goal when you read the text?
• How did you read it? Did you focus on details, or did you just try to grasp a general idea?
• How long did it take you to read? Did you read quickly without stopping, or did you pause to analyse new words and structures?
• Did your actions align with your goal?

Later, when they read for detail, we can ask similar questions to help them recognise changes in their reading approach:

• Did you read the text the same way as before?
• Were you scanning quickly for the main idea, or did you slow down to focus on the details?
• Did you stop when you came across unfamiliar words, or did you rely on context to infer their meaning?

Incorporating structured reflection and repetition can help students strengthen their reading skills and become more aware of how they approach texts based on their reading goals. My favourite part is that this helps them develop transferable strategies they can apply outside the classroom, making them more effective and confident readers!

Grammar

When teaching grammar, we usually start with a written text or listening passage that contextualises the target structure. This is incredibly useful because it helps the students make sense of the grammar through the context that makes clear and appropriate use of it. Still, once we move on to a new unit or grammatical structure, we typically move on to another topic and context too, which is why grammar structures are often tied to specific themes in our students’ minds.

For example, A2 students usually work on future structures and talk about space and going to Mars or the moon, B2 students read about astronauts, and C2 students discuss Elon Musk’s space station. As a result, when we use one of those structures in a different context students might well ask you why you’re not talking about space!

One way to break this limiting format is to conclude each unit with a discussion of when the same grammar might also be appropriate or useful in different contexts. For example, we use structures that combine modal verbs with the perfect form to talk about future predictions, when we look back at those predictions. A typical context in coursebooks would be connected to space exploration – By 2050, we will have established a colony on Mars. But if we discuss the nature of this grammatical structure with our students, they might soon realise how useful it could be to talk about ambitions, especially in a work context. You could practice answering the age-old interview question of “Where do you see yourself in five years?” In five years, I will have achieved my sales ambitions by doing X, Y, and Z.

Alternatively, you can ask students to find more contexts in which the grammar is used as a kind of research project, where they have to find texts on different topics that use the same grammar.

Vocabulary

Similarly to the learning of grammar, some words, phrases and expressions can be closely associated with the situations that we use to contextualise them, which is partly good, but there might be moments when students want to talk about other things and these words, which they do know, just won’t escape from the tip of their tongue. For example, if students learn the word “sustainable” while discussing the environment, they might not realise they can also use it when talking about business, fashion or lifestyle choices – it’s easy to learn to say “We need to explore sustainable forms of energy production” in one context, but that doesn’t mean it will be easy to say “I need to find a more sustainable routine for going to the gym, as four times a week is killing my enthusiasm!”

To help, we can introduce activities that encourage them to use new words in multiple contexts and connect them to other words they already know. Personalisation activities, where they have to use new vocabulary items to talk about their choices in different situations, can help here. We can also hold little competitions where students work in teams to convey the same ideas in as many different ways as possible, which makes them draw connections between new and familiar vocabulary, and reflect on how certain words can have similar meanings but not necessarily be used with the same collocations, dependent prepositions and in the same situations . When doing this, students do more than just learn the definitions of new words, they actively engage with the language.

Conclusion

The temptation to deal with what is in front of us – the coursebook, our students’ writing, the exam we’re helping them prepare for – and then move on is only natural and to be expected in an environment where there is a constant pressure to complete all the tasks that have been assigned to us. But if we take a moment whenever we can to look at the language we are teaching once more, if we can find time to introduce some kind of task repetition or task recycling wherever possible, I am sure that our students will soon have reason to thank us for slowing down and doing things again! After all, I can’t forget my number one goal: teaching English.

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