Audio Lingual Method

Chapter: Audio Lingual Method.

Introduction:

Audio Lingual Method is one of the earliest and established method of second language teaching. This method mainly focuses on the communicative competence with limited and common communicative structures.

Key concept:

The Audio-Lingual Method is called Army Method. In ALM, mainly three things are emphasized such as:

1. Certain habit formation through repetition and reinforcement.
2. Structural linguistics that means that means formal language is emphasized.
3. No explicit grammar instruction which means that in ALM, the syntactic explanation of sentence is not given.

Brief history:

Audio Lingual Method originated during second world war. Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) was established in 1942 to develop the foreign language communicative skills of American soldiers.

Objective:

1. To attain conversational skill in foreign language.
2. To increase demands for English courses for foreign students.
3. To develop communicative competence in learners.

Key features:

1. Dialogue is the main feature of ALM.
2. Memorization of sentence structure.
3. Repetition drill for memorizing sentence patterns.
4. No explanation of grammar.
5. Limited vocabulary.
6. Emphasize on phonetics.
7. Target language-based teaching method.
8. Very little use or no use of mother tongue.
9. Introducing language laboratory.

More Notes of ELT

Techniques:

• Language is taught through dialogues with useful use of vocabulary and common structures of communication. For example:

Complex structure: This letter has been sent to you by Mr. Khan.

Common structure: Mr. Khan sends you this letter.

• Memorization of dialogue line by line through repetition drills.
• Native like phonetics.
• Natural teaching method because reading and writing are taught after listening and speaking stage.
• Perfect participation since there is enough question-answering session in ALM.
• Inductive grammar teaching: In ALM, inductive grammar teaching method is applied. Inductive grammar teaching means that grammar is not taught with the explanation of syntactic process. Rather, the learners must identify the grammar and structure with inference or guess of the sentence structure. For example:
  • • • I went there
      • He went there
      • You went there
      • They went there
      • We went there

From the above sentences, the learners can understand that there is no necessity of change of verb in past simple tense whatever the subject is.

Advantages or strength: advantages or strengths are the context of ALM.

1. Development of listening and speaking power.
2. Correct pronunciation.
3. Large class size could be maintained.
4. Limited useful vocabulary.
5. Lucrative for average students.
6. Participation of the learners.

Disadvantages or limitations:

1. Equal importance is not given to all four skills at the time.
2. Meaning is neglected.
3. Teacher dominated method.
4. A mechanical method because of only pattern practice and memorization.
5. Profitable for the hard-working learners.

Conclusion

However, it is transparent that Audio Lingual Method cannot be neglected out and out because the low proficiency-learners could be much benefited by this method. Even the semi-educated learners are benefit takers in case of learning target language.