Page 22 - HOW TO TEACH GRAMMAR

The Audio-Lingual Method

The Audio-Lingual Method is a method for foreign language teaching which emphasized the
teaching of listening and speaking before reading and writing. I t is also called “Army Method”
because this method appeared since World War II for the American Armies who had to learn
language quickly and intensively. The structural theory of language constituted its backbone.
Structural linguistic viewed language as a system of structurally related elements for the expression
of meaning. These elements are phonemes, morphemes, words, structures and sentence types. The
language teaching theoreticians and methodologists is behavioral psychology which is an empirically
based approach to the study of human behavior. Behaviorism tries to explain how an external even
(a stimulus) caused a change in the behavior of an individual (a response) without using concept like
“mind” or “idea”.
In the Audio-lingual Method, the students first hear a language. Later, they speak the
language and after that, they read and write in it. Mother tongue is discouraged in the classroom
when this method is used. The Audio-lingual Method does not learn lots of vocabulary. Rather, the
teacher drills speaking and grammar because in this method, grammar is most important for the
student. In other word, the student must repeat grammar pattern after the teacher.

The general goal of the Audio-lingual Method is to enable the target language
communicatively. And there are two objectives in Audio-lingual Method such as;
Brook distinguishes between short-range and long-range objectives of an Audio-lingual
program. Short-range objectives include training in listening comprehension and accurate
pronunciation. Long-range objectives or the ultimate goal is to develop the student’s abilities are
same like what native speakers have, to use it automatically without stopping to think.
The main principles on which the audio-lingual method is based are the following:

Foreign language learning is basically a process of mechanical habit formation. The students
are able to give correct responses rather than by making mistake. Language skills are learned more
effectively if the item to be learned in the target language are presented in spoken form before they
are seen in written form.

Aural training is needed to provide the foundation for the development of other language
skills. Drill can enable to form correct analogies. Hence the approach to the teaching of grammar is
essentially inductive rather than deductive.

The meaning that the words of a language have for the native speaker can be learned only in
a linguistic and cultural context and not in isolation.

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