Backchaining is a method of conducting choral repetition drills by chunking the utterance and asking students to start from the end rather than the beginning, adding on earlier chunks one at a time. For example:
T : OK, I went to the supermarket on Saturday morning. Everybody, listen and repeat -
morning
Ss : Morning.
T : On Saturday morning.
Ss : On Saturday morning
T : To the supermarket on Saturday morning.
Ss : To the supermarket on Saturday morning.
T : I went to the supermarket on Saturday morning.
Ss : I went to the supermarket on Saturday morning
a) chunking makes the repetition easier for the students - they can concentrate on small numbers of words before going on to the longer utterance.
b) starting from the end allow T and Ss to keep the intonation of the phrase constant. This is lost if the utterance is frontchained.
