THE

AUDIO-
LINGUAL
METHOD
ORIGINS
 Known as the Army Method, Audio-Lingual
Method was developed in the US during
World War II. At that time, there was an
urgent need for people to learn foreign
language for military purposes.
ORIGINS
 An oral-based approach.
 It drills students in the use of grammatical
sentence patterns.
 Based on Structuralism and Behaviorist
Psychology (Skinner).
 Conditioning →helping learners to respond
correctly to stimuli through shaping and
reinforcement.
 Habit-formation
 BASIC PRINCIPLES
 Language is speech not writing.
 A language is a set of habits.
 Teach the language not about the language.
 A language is what its native speakers say,
not what someone else say they ought to
say.
 languages are different.
 BASIC PRINCIPLES
 The teacher uses only the target language.
Actions, pictures or realia are used to give
meaning.
 Teacher introduces a new dialogue by
modeling it two times; introduces drills by
modeling the correct answer; corrects
pronunciation by modeling the proper
sounds in the target language.
OBSERVATION & PRINCIPLES
 Students repeat dialogue several times—
dialogue memorization.
 Teacher uses single-slot and multiple-slot
substitution drill; question and answer drill
and uses a backward build-up drill.
 Teacher uses positive reinforcement in
correcting errors.
 I’m Going to the Post Office
 Sally : Good morning, Bill.
 Bill: Good morning, Sally.
 Sally: How are you?
 Bill: Fine, Thanks, And you?
 Sally: Fine. Where are you going?
 Bill: I’m going to the post office.
 Sally: I am too. Shall we go together?
 Sure. Let’s go.
GOALS
 Teachers want their students to be able to
use the target language communicatively.
 Overlearning →automatically without
stopping to think
 Forming new habits through overcoming
the old habit.
 TEACHER & STUDENT ROLE
 The teacher is like an orchestra leader.
 Providing students with a good model for
imitation.
 Students are imitators.
AREAS OF LANGUAGE AREA AND
SKILLS EMPHASIZED
 Vocabulary is kept to a minimum while the
students are mastering the sound system and
grammatical patterns.
 The natural order of skills presentation is
adhered to : listening, speaking, reading, and
writing.
 The oral/aural skills receive most of the
attention.
 EVALUATION
 Nature: discrete-point
→each question on the test would focus on only
one point of the language at a time.
Ex: students might be asked to distinguish
between words in a minimal pair.
 ADVANTAGES
 It was the first method to have a theory.
 It made language learning accessible to a large
group of ordinary learners.
 It was the first method to lay stress on the
development of language syntax, whereas the
other methods were preoccupied with
morphology and syntax.
 developing simple techniques and making use
of language lab.
 DISADVANTAGES
 No creativity. Learners memorize what they do
not understand.
 The techniques used become tedious and
boring causing fatigue.
 Bored advanced students.
 Many learners in class.
THE DECLINE OF AUDIO-LINGUAL
METHOD
 In the 1960’s many linguist criticized the
Audiolingualism claiming that the theoretical
foundation of this approach is weak and
students were found to be unable to use skills
learned in the classroom in real communication.
 In 1966, Chomsky criticized behaviorist
theory claiming that behaviorism cannot could
not function as a model of how humans learn
languages.
Sources:
 https://www.google.com/search?ei=cxwNXY7fLZf8wQ
O1gY7gBA&q=audio+lingual+method+ppt&oq=audioli
ngual+method+&gs_l=psy-
ab.1.2.0j0i10l3j0l2j0i10j0j0i10.13740.13740..15826...0.0..0.
198.198.0j1......0....1..gws-wiz.......0i71.9dWgQBxgjE4
 https://www.slideshare.net/omarswan/the-audio-
lingual-method-49002904
