Receptive drill may seem like a contradiction since the word drill suggests the gymnasium or the military parade ground where actions are repeated until they become automatic. For language learners this recollects the era of behaviourism and the language laboratory, a style of exercise in which the learner has no need to think about meaning, giving rise to what Julian Dakin called 'the tum-ti-tum effect'.
However, learning language does require lots of exposure and lots of repetition. The point of receptive drill is to supply exposure to many sentences which have the same or similar grammar but distinct meanings and to force the learner to think about the meaning.
Probably one of the first receptive drills was Tim Johns's TWO STICKS, in which two lines labelled A and B appear along with a sentence of the pattern A is/is not longer/shorter than B or A and B are/are not the same length and the learner has to pick TRUE or FALSE. This was originally written for a Newbrain computer, but I have recreated it here in HTML and JavaScript.
AGES is a further example. The learner's task is to read the ribboning text and decide if the sentence is true or false. I am still developing similar activities, so will add new ones gradually.
One form of receptive drill is a logic puzzle in which you call up a succession of clues in order to fill in an array of facts. One example of is this TRIP in which you have to work out the itinerary of a bus tour from a set of clues. This is still under development; the logic needs sharpening, but it will give an impressionm of the type of exercise that can be created. I hope soon to rebuild a puzzle I wrote many years ago called TRACK in which stations on a suburban railway map have to be identified.