Tag Archives: inductive

GRAMMAR

31.10.2025 Raimo J 1 Comment

My own road to master the English grammar was different.

Grammar – an oasis or a desert? For me it first was neither since I did not need it. I had learnt most of my English grammar from songs. Later on at the university I had to learn the rules as well to be able to teach them at school. While studying other languages I started to admire the beauty of grammar in other languages, too. So, these days grammar is an oasis for me. Move the arrows and make your choice!

In the early years of CLT many linguists and some teachers started to feel teaching grammar was not important and even ignored it. Fortunately, this attitude turned out to be impossible in practice and we kept on teaching grammar – but not exactly like we had done before.

There were three drastic and permanent changes in practising new grammatical structures thanks to comminicative language teaching:

Firstly, CLT teachers realized that we must make use of 3 kinds/levels of exercises in practising grammar: 1) mechanical, 2) semi-communicative and 3) communicative exercises and tasks. Up to that point exercises had nearly always been mechanical.
Secondly, having learnt the rules and having done a couple of written mechanical exercises, we moved on doing ‘authentic’ oral activities in pairs and groups. In brief, the focus was in doing oral grammatical exercises at 3 levels, instead of written ones. I will explain ‘how’ in the next articles.
Thirdly, CLT teachers realized that differentiation was needed in mixed-ability classes since some students did mainly only mechanical exercises while the best ones were able to move straight on to using the new structures in free speech or activities.

Three methods in teaching grammatical rules

Grammatical structures and rules can be taught using ‘the inductive or deductive method’ or they can be learnt without any rules just by being exposed to the new language a lot; pretty much the way mother tongues are learnt.

Most teachers know the term ‘inductive method’ of teaching grammar, which means the formulation of the rules on the basis on examples.
It is contrasted with the ‘deductive method’ which means the teacher explains the rules in detail and then lets the students practise and apply the rules. This is the easy way out in teaching grammar. The teacher thinks ‘I taught you the rules and it is up to you to learn them. Practise and we need to move on.’
The third ‘method’ is the lexical approach to teaching grammar which means learning grammatical structures as ‘chunks’ ; i.e. word combinations, words, set phrases or set structures. With minimum reference to any rules it is very similar to the learning of mother tongue. The Dodson method is based on chunks as well but it makes heavy use of the mother tongue.

I will deal with the communicative teaching of grammar, the inductive and deductive methods as well as the lexical approach and the Dodson method in much more detail in separate articles.

Few people like grammar. Grammar is just a tool, not the aim of language teaching. And it is not always a must. Like me, the English grammar can be learnt from games, songs or any other source without official teaching, without the learner realizing it!

My own history on learning and teaching the English grammar

Now I am going to have a look at my own experiences as the learner and teacher of grammar. My road to the English grammar was different.

A lot of input in a foreign language can lead to subconscious learning of grammar without knowledge of the rules.

I used to have an ambivalent attitude to grammar. When I went to the university in the early 1970s and had been accepted to study English, I knew very few rules of the English language. Still, even if I only wrote one essay in all my school years, I mastered the written language rather well. How come? It was at that time it dawned on me that I must have learnt the rules subconsciously while singing in English and spending a lot of my time listening to songs and writing down the lyrics. So I am a living example that one does not need to study any rules of a foreign language to learn it, provided we are exposed to the language for a long time, usually thanks to our hobby that involves the use of the foreign language.

So, I must have learnt the grammatical elements as chunks, lexical units of various length, and then generalized the models to cover different situations as well.

A teacher has to know the grammatical rules to be able to justify his/her marking of essays, exams and oral presentations.

Consequently, I was in deep trouble when I started teaching English before I had taken my official grammar tests at the university. For instance, I was amazed about the difficulty of making questions in English just three hours before I had to teach the rules to my evening class. When to use ‘do, does, did’ and when to leave them out and under what circumstances! What are auxuliaries and what is their roles in questions? It was all Hebrew to me! I was sweating like a little pig before the lesson. Luckily I did not know most of the adult students were teachers themselves and six of them were heads of their school.

Of course, I had to learn all the rules of English rather quickly and I actually enjoyed explaining the students why particular structures were considered wrong or inappropriate. Even more so, I enjoyed presenting grammar rules so that minimum number of grammatical terms needed to be used and the learning was logical, proceeded step by step and included a lot of oral practising.

However, I realized my road to mastering the English grammar is not a common one and therefore I have always used the inductive method in introducing most of the new grammatical points.

In some rare cases I have been applying the deductive method or the lexical approach to teaching grammar. They all work well but the success in using them depends on the proficiency level of the class. In other words, what kind of learners they are and how good their English is.

Let’s face it. If you go to the city centre and shout out ‘I know the English grammar in and out!’ no-one will be impressed.

But if you speak beautiful English with correct grammar in your utterances, some people might be impressed.

The following matters will be discussed in my next articles.

Grammar	Communicative grammar, tasks and differentiation
	The inductive and deductive method in teaching grammar
	Grammar in the ‘good old days’
	Teaching grammar the old style and CLT style, comparison
	Teaching young beginners grammar, the lexical approach
	The Dodson bilingual method

Communicative teaching (CLT), Grammar

THE INDUCTIVE AND DEDUCTIVE METHOD in teaching grammar

30.10.2025 Raimo J Leave a comment

Look at the photo above. Which one is better for learning? The teacher telling the secret of the mystery car OR the students studying the car and finding it out themselves?

The answer is at the very end of this article. Think carefully because it will reveal your attitude towards teaching grammar as well.

I know. Having studied English for many years at the university you are not supposed to lecture and shine with your knowledge in front of your class (= the deductive method). Let’s have a look at our options.

Why the inductive method? Because it forces the students to think hard. The more they crack their brains, the better they learn.

Earlier on we defined the two most common methods in teaching grammar:

“Most teachers know the term ’inductive method’ of teaching grammar, which means the formulation of the rules on the basis on examples. It is contrasted with the ’deductive method’ which means the teacher explaining the rules in detail and then letting the students practise and apply the rules. This is the easy way out in teaching grammar. The teacher thinks ’I taught you the rules and it is up to you to learn them. We need to move on.’ “

I will start by discussing ‘the inductive method’. In my opinion it is the one we can and should use in teaching nearly all grammatical points. The inductive method activates the students’ brains much better than the ‘deductive one’.

The advantages of using the inductive method

First of all, students remember the rule better if they themselves have worked it out from the sample sentences given to them.
Secondly, students become very motivated to solve the problem; it is a minor detective operation.
Thirdly, every student is given time to try to figure out the rule if the process is slow, and proceeds step by step.
The teacher can exercise his/her expertise in the matter by presenting the relevant questions when the rule is being formulated.
In most cases the process can be carried out in English but in some classes it may be better to use the mother tongue to make sure everyone understands the rule.

How does the process advance in using the inductive method?

For the method to be effective it is advisable to more or less follow the steps given below and allow differentiation in the exercise types at Stage 5 if necessary.

Stage 1: Pre-task 1 Play a board game where the students throw a dice (or roll a pencil with 1-6 dots on it) and can move onwards if they remember the 3 forms of about 20 verbs, regular and irregular ones. N.B. Always make sure the foundation for the next task is solid: Some irregular verbs must be mastered for Stage 2.

Stage 2: Pre-task 2 Have a ‘Find someone who …’ task in order to make the students use the structure to be learnt many times. The structure to be learnt is The 2nd conditional.

What would you have done, if the school had been closed today?

Action	Name if ‘YES’
I would have gone swimming.
I and my friend would have played computer games.	Peter
Me and my dad would have eaten lunch together.	Jill
I would have written our home essay.
I would have slept a couple of hours more at home.	Shirley

Stage 3: Look at the examples below and work out the rule for the main clause and for the if-clause.

The main clause	The if-clause
I would have gone downtown	if the boss had given me the task.
My mum would have taken dad’s car	if it had been in the garage,
What do these two clauses have in common? (= KEY QUESTION!!) (would have + verb) How would you translate the clauses? ‘olisin mennyt’ ‘olisi ottanut’	What do these two if-clause have in common? (the pluperfect tense) How would you translate the clauses? ‘olisi antanut’ ‘olisi ollut’

Stage 4: Let’s formulate the rule for the 2nd conditional

The road to the formulation of the rule is clear if the students spot which pattern the sample clauses have in common.

The main clause	The if-clause
would have + 3rd form of the verb	the pluperfect tense = had + 3rd form of the verb
‘olisi tehnyt’	‘olisi tehnyt’

Now the Finnish students would notice that the Finnish language does not make any difference between the main and if-clauses and for them that is the point to bear in mind. In addition to the rules, of course. In other languages the situation may be different. In any case, comparison with the mother tongue is often very useful.

Stage 5: The if-clause can be in front of or after the main clause but do not reveal it to the students. Let them fall into the ‘trap’ when they do the first exercises and they will remember the application of the rule better.

Practice session; just like we have learnt before there should be 3 kinds of tasks for the sake of differentiation. The students will do i), ii) or iii) or all of them. See the samples below as a reminder!

i) A mechanical task (a gap filling exercise, isolated sentences with no context)

I don’t understand why you said nothing. I ___________________________ (tell) him the truth, if he __________________________ (ask) me anything about it.

Why did they not let us know they were not coming? If they _____________________ (call) us, we _________________________ (leave) the party immediately.

ii) Semi-communicative exercise (a realistic context but no freedom to write creatively and use the 2nd conditional forms)

There was a robbery at a local grocery store last week and three students are discussing what they would have done if they had been in the shop at that time.

Malcolm: I ______________________________ (hide) behind the shelves and if it _____________________________ (be) possible, I _________________________(call) the police quietly.

Anne: If I __________________________ (see) the robber, I _______________________ (write down) what they looked like and how they spoke.

Cary: I ______________________________ (try) to be quiet and I ______________________________ (take) photos from my hiding place. It _____________________________ (be) very dangerous, if the robber _______________________ (see) me doing it.

iii) A real communicative task (a realistic situation/context and freedom to be creative about the content)

There was a boat accident on a lake near your school yesterday and you are talking about it with your class mates. Write at least four things you would have done if you had been there and had seen what was going on. Include at least two if-clauses in your story.

How does the process advance in the deductive method?

The decuctive method is very easy to use but in my opinion should not be used too much since the students do not need to crack their brains very much when the teacher is explaining the rules.

There are, however, a couple of cases when the use of the deductive method is justifiable:

The rules might be too complicated for the students to work out. (For example, changing ‘direct speech’ into ‘indirect speech’ includes far too many little details to be taken into account.
Working out the rules might take far too much time.
The class is not accustomed or able to formulate the rules, not even when it is done in the mother tongue.

If we look at the stages above, in the worst case a teacher in favour of the deductive method might skip Stages 1 – 3 altogether, explain the rules at Stage 4 and offer mere mechanical exercises in Stage 5.

All in all, hopefully you have now a better idea how modern CLT teachers deal with grammar and treat it as an essential part of foreign language learning.

The ‘car’ is not a real car at all but a piece of art in New York made mostly of recycled tyres.

Communicative teaching (CLT), Grammar

COMMUNICATIVE GRAMMAR, TASKS AND DIFFERENTIATION

30.10.2025 Raimo J Leave a comment

Many teachers feel guilty when their students rarely reach the stage of ‘real’ communication while learning grammar. Please, don’t! Just provide the opportunities for ‘real-life’ practice.

In fact, there is no actual communicative grammar. In CLT we teach grammar rules pretty much the same way we did before using mainly the inductive method and ocassionally deductive method as well.

Thanks to CLT we started to apply the rules differently: first with a lot of oral exercises in ‘real-life’ situations (role plays, task-based exercises etc.) and after that we applied the rules in writing as well.

Don’t mind the grammatical errors, they will disappear later on. And even if they don’t, it is not the end of the world. No-one makes mistakes on purpose (unless they are joking).
Don’t be pleased with mechanical written exercises and stop there, if your students can do better.

My greatest concerns with grammar at this point have always been:

Which of the three methods of dealing with the rules should I choose?
Can I go straight to communicative exercises or should I proceed in this particular order 1) mechanical, 2) semi-communicative or 3) communicative exercises.
Is there a way to differentiate the learning of grammar?
What else should I take into account when teaching grammar?

MY RECOMMENDED GUIDELINES FOR TEACHING GRAMMAR

1 Start with a pre-task where the students use the new structure and become subconsciously aware of the structure, minimal chance for mistakes. Find someone who … is my favourite CLT pre-task: no chance to make mistakes but the students talk a lot and get a feeling of the new structure. See my example below.

2 Choose an appropriate ‘method’ of dealing with the rules.
a) the inductive method; it is in most cases the one I favour, the students work out the rules themselves using some examples, the effort and thinking result in the students remembering the rules better

b) the decuctive method; the teacher explains the rules and lets the students apply them in exercises; some rules are too complicated for the students to work out or it would simply take too much time

c) the lexical approach; rules are seldom given at all but they are learnt using fixed/set grammatical patterns as models for the structures; most appropriate for beginners and elementary class students whose conceptual thinking is not high enough to grasp abstract rules

THE TEACHER KNOWS HIS/HER CLASS BEST – AND HE/SHE IS THEREFORE ENTITLED TO CHOOSE a), b) or c) in each case.

3 Be prepared to differentiate the teaching of grammar. Low-achievers are able to recognize the structures and apply them in simple sentences with models. Advanced students can be very creative with the structures once they know the rule.
These methods and approaches are dealt with in more detail in the next articles.

Examples on each Task type

Let me demonstrate how to proceed from a pre-task to a mechanical exercise towards a communicative one. This is a written example but it could be carried out orally as well.

Pre-task, Find someone who

The pre-task is a combination or ‘indefinitive pronouns’ and ‘the perfect tense’ The students present the Yes/No-questions and write the name of those who answer ‘Yes’ in the box.

1 Have you seen any Tarzan films?	Michael
2 Has your dad used any vehicle this morning/afternoon?
3 Has somebody told you a joke today?
4 Have you done every school task for today?
5 Has you mum already gone to work or somewhere else this morning/afternoon?	Alison
6 Has anyone listened to the Beatles today?
Some of the questions are hard ones on purpose and the students have to repat the questions many times.

The same name may appear only once in the list. After five minutes the sentences are read in groups of four: ‘Michael has seen (some) Tarzan films’ etc. The same sentences can be used in the formulation of the rules.

3 types of grammatical exercises

i) A mechanical task with no real-life context and communicative purpose. However, one must not underestimate these kind of tasks since they also require a lot of knowledge of the target language.

A: What have you done today?

B: I __________________ a letter? (write)

A: What has your mum done today?

B: She _______________________ the bathroom. (clean)

A: What have your classmates done this week?

B: They ______________________ swimming. (go)

A: What have you done this summer?

B: I ___________________ to drive a car and I ________________ a lot of French. (learn, speak)

The rule for the perfect tense ‘has/have + 3rd form of the verb’ has to be known and applied but we have only isolated sentences with no connection to real life. A very easy drill and a gap exercise. Still, some students get no further than this level.

ii) A semi-commmunicative task, the context and the conversation is more natural. Still, the problem is that there is no room for creativity and the students are tied to use the phrases and verbs given.

Let’s practice the past continous forms (was/were + -ing-form)

Jim: Hi, Brenda. I heard you were in an accident. What happened?

Brenda: Hi, Jim. Yes, but I’m ok. My dad ___________________ (drive) our Toyota near the beach and I ______________________ (sit) next to him when a lorry hit us from behind.

Jim: Oh, dear. _______ it _______________ (rain) or something or what was the reason for the accident?

Brenda: No, no. The sun _______________________ (shine) and the weather was fine.

Jim: What was it then? Maybe the lorry driver __________________ (talk) on the phone and didn’t see when you ____________________ (slow down).

Brenda: No, the police think that the breaks of the lorry ________________ (not, work) properly.

Jim: Well, thank God you are fine. My father ________________ (check) our car yesterday when I came home. But it seemed to be alright.

Advanced students do this exercise in two minutes and do not find it challenging and motivating. Yes, it resembles ordinary discussion but … So we need to give them a creative challenge.

iii) A true communicative task. The students are free to create a story of their own and also use other linguistic means than the grammar point referred to in the guidance part under the photos.

Task: Look at the photos and write a story in pairs or in a group of three on the basis of the photos. You do not have to use all photos and you can add other ideas too. The title: ‘Me as an eye-witness’

You are free to create your own story but you must include the following ideas in your story:

What was the incident? What was the time when the incident happened? Where were you in New York?
What were you and the people around you doing when the incident took place?
You called home and your friends. What were your parents and your friends doing at that time?
How did it all end?

How does differentiation work if these recommendations are followed?

Stage 1: The pre-task. It is a compulsory task for everybody.

Stage 2: The students are completely free to choose any of the three exercise types: 1) Mechanical exercises 2) Semi-communicative exercises or 3) Communicative exercises.

In other words, some students choose 1) or 2) or 3) only and ignore the rest. The others might take 1) and 2) or 2) and 3) etc. without the teacher telling them which one to choose. The best ones might take only 3) and expand that one even further.

Of course when you are introducing this idea to the students, you can tell them that this is the difficulty order as well but later on it is not necessary any more.

All three approaches how to cope with the grammatical rules will be dealt with in more detail in the following articles. The final grammar article is about the Dodson method, which is one methological option in teaching slow learners and beginners. The interesting thing in it is how the teacher makes use of the mother tongue in this method.

Communicative teaching (CLT), Grammar

TEACHING GRAMMAR THE OLD AND CLT STYLE, comparison

30.10.2025 Raimo J Leave a comment

They say 7 is a lucky, godly number. I am not supertitious but I have 7 reasons that speak in favour of the CLT approach to teaching grammar.

Benefits of teaching grammar in CLT style

The use of pre-tasks reduces anxiety around the new structure.
After the pre-task the structure feels familiar and easier to learn.
Using the inductive method activates the brains and enhances learning.
Practice is not limited to mechanical written exercises but taken further with versatile oral exercises.
Working and checking the tasks together in groups the students teach and help each other in a relaxed atmosphere.
The final aim is to have truly communicative activities such as role plays.
Grammar is seen as a tool, not as an aim of its own.

Grammar in the old days

CLT ideas on Grammar

PRE-TASK, very rarely used

PRE-TASK, commonly used

Frequent oral tasks before the rules of a new structure are introduced,
Students use the structure 15 -30 times in a few minutes.
They get a feeling they already know the structure.
No great possibility to make mistakes thanks to models or ready-made sentences.

INTRODUCING THE RULES Deductive method
Rules voiced by the teacher
Little student involvement
Comparison with mother tongue
Lexical approach with beginners

INTRODUCING THE RULES Inductive method
Teacher-guided process
A lot of student involvement
Comparison with mother tongue
Lexical approach with beginners

PRACTICE OF THE STRUCTURE
Mostly written exercises which get systematically more and more demanding.
Mechanical exercises, very seldom even semi-communicative
Everybody is doing the same exercises, no differentiation.
Oral exercises are limited to mechanical drills in class or language labs.
Exercises are mostly done alone or supervised by teacher, checked with the teacher too.

PRACTICE OF THE STRUCTURE
Both written and oral exercises which get systematically more and more demanding.
Written exercises which start from mechanical ones, turn semi-communicative and finally fully communicative.
Students can often decide which difficulty level they prefer.
Oral exercises follow the same logic, differentiation is used
Exercises are mostly done and checked in pairs or groups.

One has to be realistic and admit that in many classes this would be as far as many students are able to go. If they understand the rule and can apply it both in written and oral exercises of various kind, you as their teacher can be proud of them. Most importantly the students recognize the structurein all situations and can use it in speech as well.

Let’s think about the previous article and the way I used to teach the present tense passive voice once again. I will show you now how to turn the mechanical exercise to a communicative one. The example below combines written and oral communication and would be one way to end the teaching of the structure.

How can we turn the practice of the present tense passive voice more communicative?

First of all, the inductive formulation of the rule is best done slowly with the teacher in charge to give everyone time to think about the matters.
Secondly, exercises such as 1 – 4 in the previous article can be done in groups with a star student as the leader of the group and the others give the answers.
Thirdly, the teacher has to think in advance of a situation where natives would use the present tense passive voice structure. The most obvious situation is describing a process or a series of events where things happen but we do not need to know who does it.

Fourthly, the groups do an oral practice by taking turns in explaining a process: What happens to cars in their life time? How to make fashion clothes? How to make your greenhouse plants grow well? How to drive a car or plan a journey?

Fifth, the group decides on the process to be described in writing:

A couples of examples of the kind of sentences required are needed as models.

What is done in a local McDonald’s during an ordinary day to serve the customers well?

What is done before my day in the riding stable is done?

What is done?

Other topics: playing football or icehockey / at home or school

…

The place is cleaned between 5 and 7 a.m.
Kitchen preparations for the meals are done before opening.
The doors are opened at 9.00.

I am taken to the stables by my dad round four p.m and the horses are groomed before the lesson. We are given other chores too to do before we are allowed to saddle the horses. etc.

Models like above are needed to stir the students’ imagination and to give them an idea of what they are supposed to do.
Sixth, the descriptions are checked by the teacher while the writing process is going on. Finally the descriptions are read aloud in front of the class, each student reading at least one sentence. The ideas can be challenged by the other groups if they think something essential was ignored.

Make coming in front of the class a habit. Yes, it is scary at first but not so much any more after twenty trials. After two and a half years a very shy IB-student of mine took all of us by surprise when she wanted to give a presentation on ballet. No-one knew she was a ballet dancer but when she got in the front and made us copy her movements explaining what is done in a ballet practice and why, she became a shining star in the very last lesson we had together. She finally found her confidence in doing what none of us was able to do. I will never forget the smile on her face and the courageous memory she left on all of us. And the brilliant example of using the present tense in the passive voice. Yes, I feel like a wet blanket now. Mixing grammar with brilliance. But grammar is important, right?

Communicative teaching (CLT), Grammar, Historical perspectives

GRAMMAR in the ‘GOOD old days’

30.10.2025 Raimo J Leave a comment

Most of the things done in the old style in teaching grammar were perfectly ok and are valid even today. We simply made a mistake by stopping half way through: unfortunately we were pleased with mechanical written exercises and ignored creative tasks and oral practice.

Up to the times of the introduction and first applications of CLT principles in the early 1980s grammar was mostly taught using the deductive method. The all-knowing teacher revealed the secret rules one by one and they were applied right away but only in writing. (Sorry, I am being sarcastic.) The grammar exams were also only in writing.

The good thing about the teaching of grammar was that at its best it was done very systematically. Hunting down my treasures from the 1980s I found the following example on teaching the present tense of the passive voice. Part of the text is in Finnish since mother tongue was often made use of in those days. But I still think you can get my point when you look at the original exercises taken from SIIE series published by an excellent educational publisher WSOY, Finland.

N.B. I’d like to point out that there was or is nothing wrong in teaching the present tense passive voice the way it is presented below. The only problem is that 1) we used to stop too early and 2) were pleased with mechanical exercises and 3) we had no real communicative tasks.

How the present tense in the passive voice was taught in the ‘good old days’

There were three things done before the students were given the exercises below.

We made sure the three forms of irregular verbs were mastered. It they are not, the whole thing collapses. It is still the same today.
We studied a chapter in the textbook which had plenty of these structures and the word list had a translation of them to make understanding of the chapter easier. This is still often the case in CLT lessons.
The teacher explained the rule to be applied and told that in the passive voice we do not know exactly who does the action. These days we start with an oral pre-task and prefer the inductive method to get the students more involved and to enhance memorization of the rule.

ENGLISH	FINNISH
AM IS + 3rd form of verb ARE	-taan, -tään -daan, -dään ostetaan, syödään
2 words	1 word
Negation with the word ‘not’

An example of a well-structured exercise from the 1980s

The rule could easily be formed on the basis of the first 5 sentences.

Exercise 1 above intensifies the memorization of the mother tongue structure and checks if the student recognizes the corresponding structure in the English sentence.

Exercise 2 is excellent in demonstrating the difference in meaning of the corresponding active and passive structure. It will keep the students on their toes with this structure. Once again we are on the level of recognizing the structure.

Exercise 3 is another excellent task. The writer of the task has anticipated one of the main problems weak students are going to face: choice between ‘am, is, are’. It is hard for some students to grasp that ‘tea’ is 3rd person singular, the same as ‘it’ or ‘tins’ is the same as ‘they’.

Exercise 4 is a very typical gap exercise used in testing the knowledge of just about any grammatical structure. If you have read my previous articles, you realize that stopping here is a mistake because we are still at the level of mechanical application of the rule. Why? Because there is no relevat context, the sentences are not logically connected and there is no chance for the students to produce creative sentences of their own with this structure.

Drills seem to be out of fashion but I think they could often be used orally to give another perspective to the new structure. Besides they do not take a lot of time.

One thing that I have barely mentioned in my articles are drills. They used to be very popular in the 1970s and 1980s but somehow they have disappeared. I think textbook writes started to think that they themselves sound oldfashioned if they recommend or include drills in their books and left them out altogether.

I think this was a mistake and anyone who looks at the exercise below where one has to covert an active voice sentence into the passive voice realizes that a learner has to master a lot of things before he/she can apply the rules in a realistic exercise/conversation.

Yes, it is not what we normally do when we talk but it enforces the application of the passive voice rules and can be done orally in pairs in just a few minutes. In brief, an oral drill can be a very effective intermediate task before a real communicative exercise.

This kind of drills were often practised and recorded in language laboratories in 4 stages. Yes, it looks boring and was boring and therefore probably dropped out of fashion.

Teacher: Tom speaks English.

Student: English is spoken by Tom.

Teacher giving the correct answer: English is spoken by Tom.

Student repeats it: English is spoken by Tom.

Still, I think we could use drills more than we actually do today.

Drills do not take a lot of time if done orally and checked in pairs or in a group.
What I like about them is that the students can visualize the changes that they have to make.
If needed the teacher can work on simple drills with the low-achievers while others are doing more demanding exercises.