THE AUDIOLINGUAL METHOD

THE AUDIOLINGUAL METHOD

Language teaching specialists draw on the earlier experience of the army programs and the Aural-Oral or Structural Approach developed by Fries and his colleagues, adding in sights taken from behaviorist psychology. This combination of structural linguistic theory, contrastive analysis, aural-oral procedures, and behaviorist psychology led to the Audiolingual Method.

The Audiolingual Method emphasizes the teaching of listening and speaking, then reading and writing. My classmate and I think that it is a good way to learn a foreign language because is the same way that we learnt our first language, but the disadvantage is that the learner just listen to the teacher and repeat just what him or she said. The use of drills and patter practice like repetition, inflection, replacement, restatement, completion, transposition, expansion, contraction, transformation, integration, rejoinder and restoration are a distinctive feature of this method. However these activities are not useful enough because the learner has the role of responding to stimuli even he or she doesn´t understand the meaning of what the teacher are saying.

In conclusion, the use of this method in language teaching makes that the students do not be able to transfer skill acquired in class to real communication outside the classroom. On the other hand, drills and dialogues help to learners to develop the communicative competence and make that they respond quickly and accurately in the foreign language.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

"Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching" Jack C. Richards. Page 51-67

Written by:

 Yadira Cano Gómez

Liliana Morales Melendez