Audio-Lingual Method

The History of Audio-lingual Method

“The outbreak of World War II heightened the need for Americans to become orally proficient in the languages of their allies and enemies alike. To this end, bits and pieces of the Direct Method were appropriated in order to form and support this new method, the "Army Method," which came to be known in the 1950s as the Audiolingual Method.
The Audiolingual Method was based on linguistic and psychological theory and one of its main premises was the scientific descriptive analysis of a wide assortment of languages. On the other hand, conditioning and habit-formation models of learning put forward by behaviouristic phychologists were married with the pattern practices of the Audiolingual Method.”


Principles

New material is presented in the form of a dialogue. This method is said to result in rapid acquisition of speaking and listening skills. The audiolingual method drills students in the use of grammatical sentence patterns. When this method was developed it was thought that the way to acquire the sentence patterns of the second language was through conditioning or helping learners to respond correctly to stimuli through shaping and reinforcement.

“1.Instructions are given in the target language.
2.Language forms occur within a context.
3.Students' native language interferes as little as possible with the students' attemps to acquire the target language.
4.Teaching is directed to provide students with a native-speaker-like-model.
5.Analogy provides a better foundation for language learning than analysis.
6.Errors are carefully avoided because they lead to the formation of bad habits.
7.Positive reinforcement helps the student to develop correct habits.
8.Student are encouraged to learn to respond to both verbal and nonverbal stimuli.
9.The teacher is regarded as an orchestra leader-conducting, guiding and controlling the students' behavior in the target language.
10.Learning a foreign language is treated on par with the native language learning.
11.A comparison between the native language and the target language is supposed to help teachers to find the areas with which their students probably experience difficulty: this is expected to help to students to overcome the habit of the native language.
12.Language is not seen the seperated from culture. Culture is the everyday behavior of people who use the target language. One of the teachers' responsibilities is to present information about that culture in context.
13.Students are taken to be imitators of teacher's model or the tapes.
14.The dialogue is the chief means of presenting vocabulary, structures and its learned through repetition and imitation.
15.Mimicry, memorization and the pattern drills are the practice techniques that are emphasized.
16.Most of the interaction is between the teacher and the learner and it is imitated by the learner.
17.Listening and speaking are given the priority in the language teaching, and they precede reading and writing.
18.Correct pronunciation, stress, rhythm and intonation are emphasized.
19.The meanings of the words are derived in a linguistics and cultural context and not in isolation.
20.Audio-visual aids are used to assist the students' ability to form new language habits.”

Strategies Using the Audiolingual Method

1.Students are given a short dialog to memorize then they must use mimicry and applied role playing to present the dialog. Examples of dialogs that could be used are included in the materials section.
2.Provide students with the the sentence fragments found in the materials section. Students repeat each part of the sentence starting at the end of the sentence and expanding backwards through the sentence adding each part in sequence.
3.The teacher provides a question which must be transformed into a statement. An extension of this activity is to have the students make a question out of a statement.
4.A chain of conversation forms around the room as the teacher greets or questions a student and that student responds then turns to the next student and greets or asks a question of the second student and the chain continues.
5.Have the students fill in the blanks in the dialogs provided. The proper English word must be inserted into the text. This activity is much like a close activity.
6.The teacher picks a category. The game continues in a manner with each consecutive student adding an item beginning with the next letter after repeating the items named before their own.
7.Repetition Drill: students repeat teacher's model as quickly and accurately as possible.
8.Single slot substition Drill: Teachers state a line from the dialogue then use a word or phrase as a 'clue' that students, when repeating the line must substitute into the sentence in the correct place.
9.Multiple slot Substiiton Drill: Same as he single slot drill except that there are multiple cues to be substituted into the line.
10.Question-Answer Drill: Students should answer and ask questions very quickly.”

Advantages
It enables the students to be competent in all four language skills, speaking, reading, writing and listening.
By the help of techniques we have described the students can speak fluently and comprehend the context very early in the target language.
Reading and writing are not ignored.
Students' motivation in Audio-lingual class is on the whole, high.
This method gives opportunity of being active participation of all the students.

Disadvantages
Students are educated in a mechanical way, they can progress like well-trained parrots who are able to repeat whole dialogue perfectly but uncertain of the meaning but they are saying or unable to use perfectly memorized in context other than taht in which they learned them.
It has been said that the techniques of memorization and drilling that this method implies can become intensely tedious and boring, causing fatigue and distate on the part of the students.
Another disadvantage is that, students are taught to make same changes on language patterns by a process of analogy without being given a clear idea of what they are doing.
Types and ages of the students or other controversial subjects of Audio-lingual method.


References: http://www.englishclub.com/tefl-articles/history-english-language-teaching.htm
http://coe.sdsu.edu/people/jmora/almmethods.htm
http://www.saskschools.ca/curr_content/hutt/esl/amtheory.htm
http://www.myingilizce.com/index.php?topic=7696.0
http://books.google.com.tr/books?id=iJ3Y_wkkwa8C&lpg=PA48&dq=1


Presenters: Muazzez Bozbay Gökhan Boydağ
Tuba Bilir Gülizar Yahşi