Audio Lingual

The Audio lingual Method

    The Audio-lingual Method is a method of foreign language teaching which emphasizes the teaching of listening and speaking before reading and writing. It uses dialogues as the main form of language presentation and drills as the main training techniques. Mother tongue is discouraged in the classroom.

Background

    The Audio-lingual Method was developed in the U.S. during the Second World War. At that time, the U.S. government found it a great necessity to set up a special language-training program to supply the war with language personnel. Therefore, the government commissioned American universities to develop foreign language program for military personnel. Thus the Army Specialized Training Programme (ASTP) was established in 1942.The objectives of the army programme was for students to attain conversational proficiency in a variety of foreign languages. The method used was known as the “informant method, since it used a native speaker of the language, the informant, and a linguist. The informant served as a source of language for imitation, and the linguist supervised the learning experience. The intensive system adopted by the army achieved excellent results.

     Linguists and applied linguists during this period were becoming increasingly involved in the teaching of English as a foreign language. In 1941 the first English Language institute in the U.S. was established to in the University of Michigan. The director of the institute was Charles Fries, who applied the principles of structural linguists to language teaching. The result is an approach which advocated aural training first, then pronunciation training, followed by speaking, reading and writing.

     The emergence of the Audio-lingual Method resulted from the increased attention to foreign language teaching in the U.S. towards the end of the 1950s.The need for a radical change and rethinking of foreign language teaching methodology made language teaching specialists set about developing a method that was applicable to conditions in U.S. college and university classrooms. They drew on the earlier experience of the army programmes and the Aural-Oral or structural Approach developed by Fries and his colleagues, adding insights taken from behaviorist psychology. This combination of structural linguistic theory, aural-oral procedures, and behaviourist psychology led to the Audio-lingual Method, which was widely adopted for teaching foreign languages in North American colleges and universities.

Theory of language

The theory of language underlying Audio lingualism was derived from a view proposed by American linguists in the 1930s and 1940s. The view then came to be known as structural linguistics with Bloomfield and Fries as its representatives. Structural linguistics views language as a system of structurally related elements for the expression of meaning. These elements are phonemes, morphemes, words, structures, and sentence types. The grammatical system consists of a list of grammatical elements and rules for their linear combination into words, phrases, phrases and sentences.

 According to a structural view, language has the following characteristics:

Elements in a language are produced in a rule-governed (structural) way.

Language samples could be exhaustively described at any structural level of description. Language is structural like a pyramid, that is, linguistic level is system within system

Language is speech, not writing. Languages are different

The views of language above offered the foundation for the Audio lingual Method.

Theory of learning

Behaviourist psychology

The learning theory of Audio lingualism is behavioral psychology which is an empirically based approach to the study of human behaviour. Behaviourism tries to explain how an external event (a stimulus) caused a change in the behaviour of an individual (a response) without using concepts like“mind”or “ideas” or any kind of mental behaviour. Behaviourist psychology states that people are conditioned to learn many forms of behaviour, including language, through the process of training or conditioning.

The three crucial elements in learning: a stimulus, a response and reinforcement.

The occurrence of these behaviours is dependent upon three crucial elements in learning: a stimulus, which serves to elicit behaviour; a response triggered by a stimulus; and reinforcement, which serves to mark the response as being appropriate (or inappropriate) and encourage the repetition (or suppression) of the response in the future. Learning is thus described as the formation of association between stimuli and responses.

The application of this theory to language learning

             To apply this theory to language learning is to identify the organism as the foreign language learner, the behaviour as verbal behaviour, the stimulus as what is taught (language input), the response as the learner’s reaction to the stimulus, and the reinforcement as the approval or praise (or discouragement) of the teacher or fellow students.

Language learning: a mechanical process of habit formation

   According to this behaviourist psychology, learning a language is a process of acquiring a set of appropriate language stimulus-response chains, a mechanical process of habit formation.

     Main features

 By drawing on the structural linguistics and behaviourist psychology, the Audiolingual Method formed its own distinctive characteristics.

There are mainly five of them:

Separation of language skills into listening, speaking, reading and writing, with emphasis on the teaching of listening and speaking before reading and writing

Use of dialogues as the chief means of presenting the language

  Emphasis on certain practice techniques: mimicry, memorization and pattern drills.

Discouraging the use of the mother tongue in the classroom

Use of language lab

Objectives

     The general objective of the Audiolingual Method is to enable the target language communicatively, Short-range objectives include training in listening comprehension, accurate pronunciation, reading comprehension and production of the Audiolingual Method are the development of mastery in all four language skills, beginning with listening and speaking, and using these as a basis for the teaching of reading and writing. Long-range objective, or the ultimate goal, is to develop in the students the same types of abilities that native speaking have, to use it automatically without stopping to think.

Techniques

Dialogues and pattern practice form the basis of audiolingual classroom practice. The use of them is a distinctive feature of the Audiolingual Method. The techniques used by the Audiolingual Method are:

Repetition drill -This drill is often used to teach the lines of the dialogue. Students are asked to repeat the teacher’s model as accurately and as quickly as possible.e.g.                   T              S

This is a book→This is a book.

Students do this without looking at their book. They have to produce the appropriate sounds first.

Substitution drill

The students repeat the line from the dialogue which the teacher has given them, substituting the cue into the line in its proper place. e.g.:

                   T           C         S

They drink wine. → beer→They drink beer.

                →coffee→They drink coffee.

                →tea→They drink tea.

The major purpose of this drill is to give the students practice in finding and filling in the slots of a sentence.

Question-and-answer drill

The drill gives students practice with answering questions. The students should answer the teacher’s question very quickly. It is also possible for the teacher to cue the students to ask questions as well. This gives students practice with the question pattern. e.g.

             T: Are there any questions?       Ss: No, there aren’t any.

T: Is there any milk?             Ss: No, there isn’t any.

T: Are there any sandwiches?      Ss: No, there aren’t any.

T: Is there any wine?             Ss: No, there isn’t any.

            T: he read The Times             Ss: What did he read?

    T: He said “Good morning.        Ss: What did he say?

    T: He saw “The Sound of Music.                  Ss: What did he see?

Expansion drill

This drill helps students to produce longer sentence bit by bit, gradually achieving fluency.  The main structure is repeated first, and then students have to put cue phrase in its proper place. e.g.

T: They go to the cinema.

Ss: They go to the cinema.

T: On Sundays

Ss: They go to the cinema on Sundays.

T: Always.

Ss: They always go to the cinema on Sundays.

T: Nearly.

Ss: They nearly always go to the cinema on Sundays.

Clause combination drill

Students learn to combine two simple sentences into a complex one. e.g.

T: It may rain. He’ll stay at home.

Ss: If it may rain, he’ll stay at home.

T: It may be sunny. We’ll go to the beach.

Ss: If it may be sunny, we’ll go to the beach.

T: It may snow. They’ll go skating.

Ss: If it may snow, they’ll go skating.

 Background build-up drill or back chaining

This drill is used when a long line of dialogue is giving students trouble. The teacher breaks down the line into several parts. The students repeat a part of the sentence, usually the last phrase of the line. Then, following the teacher’s cue, the students expand what they are repeating part by part until they are able to repeat the entire line. The teacher begins with the part at the end of the sentence (and works backward from there) to keep the intonation of the line as natural as possible. This also directs more student attention to the end of the sentence, where new information typically occurs. e.g.

T: the flowers

Ss: the flowers

T: watering the flowers

Ss: watering the flowers

T: is watering the flowers

Ss: is watering the flowers

T: Ian is watering the flowers.