Drilling is a teaching-learning technique or a strategy in ______.

In language pedagogy, one major strand treats language as a system of structural patterns (sound, word, and sentence structures) to be mastered by the learner. Teaching methods built on this strand pair that structural view with a behaviourist psychology of learning: correct structures are internalized through repeated stimulus-response-reinforcement practice — that is, habit formation — until the response becomes automatic and error-free. This structural, habit-formation combination differs from views that treat learning as active meaning-construction, meaning-focused communicative interaction, or vocabulary-chunk acquisition.

Drilling — the repeated oral practice of a fixed sentence pattern until the learner produces it automatically and error-free — is the core classroom technique of the Audio-lingual Method, which is built on exactly this pairing: Structuralism supplies the structural patterns to be practiced, and behaviourist habit-formation supplies the repetition-based method for fixing them. Because drilling targets structural accuracy through repetition, the technique in the stem is grounded in Structuralism.

• Constructivist language teaching has learners actively construct their own understanding through discovery and social interaction, not through repeating a fixed pattern.

• Communicative language teaching prioritizes meaningful, purposeful exchange and fluency over mechanical repetition of isolated patterns.

• The lexical approach organizes teaching around vocabulary chunks and collocations, not around grammatical pattern repetition.

None of these three is built around repetition-based habit formation — the defining feature of drilling — so Structuralism is the approach that grounds this technique.