The Audio-Lingual Method

The Audio-Lingual Method

by Alonso Perez

​Introduction

​The Audio-Lingual Method is similar to the Direct Method, it is also an oral-based approach.

​The Audio-Lingual Method drills students in the use of grammatical sentence patterns.

​Unlike the Direct Method, it has a strong theoretical base in linguistics and psychology.

​Introduction

• ​Charles Fries

• ​The Michigan Method

• ​Behavioral psychology (Skinner, 1957)

• ​Conditioning

​Principles of the Audio-Lingual Method

• ​Language forms do not occur by themselves; they occur most naturally within a context.

• ​The native language and the target language have separate linguistic systems.

• ​One of the language teacher’s major roles is that of a model of the target language.

• ​Language learning is a process of habit formation.

• ​It is important to prevent learners from making errors.

​​Principles of the Audio-Lingual Method

• ​Particular parts of speech occupy particular ‘slots’ in sentences.

• ​Positive reinforcement helps the students to develop correct habits.

• ​Students should learn to respond to both verbal and nonverbal stimuli.

• ​Each language has a finite number of patterns.

• ​Students should ‘overlearn,’ i.e. learn to answer automatically without stopping to think.

• ​The teacher should be like an orchestra leader—conducting, guiding, and controlling the students’ behavior in the target language

​Principles of the Audio-Lingual Method

• ​The major objective of language teaching should be for students to acquire the structural patterns.

• ​The learning of another language should be the same as the acquisition of the native language.

• ​Speech is more basic to language than the written form.

• ​Culture is not only literature and the arts, but also the everyday behavior of the people who use the target language.

​Bibliography

• ​​Larsen-Freeman, D. and Anderson, M., 2011. Techniques and principles in language teaching. 1st ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.59-79.