I. AUDIO-LINGUAL METHOD: Introduction by Diane Larsen-Freeman
1. Language learning is a process of habit formation.
2. It is important for teachers to prevent student error since errors can lead to the formation of
bad habits.
3. Students should overlearn the sentence patterns of the target language.
4. Positive reinforcement helps students to develop correct habits.
Video Presentation: The first method we will observe is the Audio-Lingual Method or ALM. It is a method with
which many of you may already be familiar. My colleague, Michael Jerald, will now demonstrate the ALM.
Watch carefully what the teacher is doing and what he is asking the students to do.
[Video Demonstration of Audio-Lingual Method by Michael Jerald: See Audio-Lingual Method Materials
following Commentary.]
Video Commentary: As the lesson began, we saw the teacher presenting a dialogue to the class. The stu-
dents just listened to the teacher at first. One of the ALM teacher’s major roles is that of a model of the tar-
get language. It is the students’ job to repeat as accurately as they can the teacher’s model. Language learn-
ing is seen to be a process of habit formation. The more often the students repeat something, the stronger
the habit and the greater the learning.
We saw how the students stumbled over one of the lines of the dialogue they were repeating. When this
happened, the teacher used a backward build-up drill with the troublesome line. He started at the end of the
sentence, and had the students repeat the final phrase. To this he added each phrase in turn until the stu-
dents were able to say the whole sentence smoothly.
The teacher corrected the students’ errors in other ways as well, for example, by quickly saying the phrase
for the students to hear and repeat. It is important to prevent learners from making errors since errors lead
to the formation of bad habits.
Later in the lesson, the teacher uses grammar drills: a single-slot substitution drill and a question-and-answer
drill. These drills help students to learn, or even better to “overlearn” the sentence patterns of the target lan-
guage. The overlearning leads to automaticity.
You may have noticed that the teacher often said “Good” or “Very good.” In this way, he positively rein-
forced his students’ work. Such reinforcement helps the students to develop correct habits. It wasn’t until the
end of the lesson that the students got to see the written version of the dialogue which they were learning.
This is consistent with the ALM principle that speech is more basic to language than the written form.
[End of Commentary]
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