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4 The Audiolingual Method
Background
1. Teaching English as a Foreign Language before WWII The Coleman Report in 1929 recommended a reading-based approach to foreign language teaching for use in American schools and colleges (Chapter 1). This emphasized teaching the comprehension of texts. Teachers taught from books containing short reading passages in the foreign language, preceded by lists of vocabulary. Rapid silent reading was the goal, but in practice teachers often resorted to discussing the content of the passage in English. Those involved in the teaching of English as a second language in the United States between the two world wars used either a modified Direct Method approach, a reading-based approach, or a reading-oral approach Marian (1972). Unlike the ap 0 01 Fproach that was being developed by British applied linguists during the same period, there was little attempt to treat language content systemat 0 01 Fically. Sentence patterns and grammar were introduced at the whim of the textbook writer. There was no standardization of the vocabulary or grammar that was included. Neither was there a consensus on what grammar, sentence patterns, and vocabulary were most important for beginning, intermediate, or advanced learners.
Changes in TEFL after WWII But the entry of the United States into World War II had a significant effect on language teaching in America. To supply the U.S. government with personnel who were fluent in German, French, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Malay, and other languages, and who could work as interpret 0 01 Fers, code-room assistants, and translators, it was necessary to set up a special language training program. The government commissioned American universities to develop foreign language programs for military personnel. Thus the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) was established in 1942. Fifty-five American universities were involved in the program by the beginning of 1943. The objective of the army programs was for students to attain conver 0 01 Fsational proficiency in a variety of foreign languages. Since this was not the goal of conventional foreign language courses in the United States, new approaches were necessary. Linguists, such as Leonard Bloomfield at Yale, had already developed training programs as part of their
linguistic research that were designed to give linguists and anthropologists mastery of American Indian languages and other languages they were studying. Textbooks did not exist for such languages. The technique Bloomfield and his colleagues used was sometimes known as the "informant method," since it used a native speaker of the language - the informant who served as a source of phrases and vocabulary and who provided sentences for imitation, and a linguist, who supervised the learning experience. The linguist did not necessarily know the language but was trained in eliciting the basic structure of the language from the informant. Thus the students and the linguist were able to take part in guided conversation with the informant, and together they gradually learned how to speak the language, as well as to understand much of its basic grammar. Students in such courses studied 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. There were generally 15 hours of drill with native speakers and 20 to 30 hours of private study spread over two to three 6-week sessions. This was the system adopted by the army, and in small classes of mature and highly motivated students, excellent results were often achieved. The Army Specialized Training Program lasted only about two years but attracted considerable attention in the popular press and in the aca 0 01 Fdemic community. For the next 10 years the "Army Method" and its suitability for use in regular language programs were discussed. But the linguists who developed the ASTP were not interested primarily in language teaching. The "methodology" of the Army Method, like the Direct Method, derived from the intensity of contact with the target language rather than from any well-developed methodological basis. It was a pro 0 01 F- gram innovative mainly in terms of the procedures used and the intensity of teaching rather than in terms of its underlying theory. However, it did convince a number of prominent linguists of the value of an intensive, oral-based approach to the learning of a foreign language.
Effect of USA´s international power on EFLT
**2. Theoretical basis of the audiolingual approach
- Characteristics of the audiolingual approach** Linguists and applied linguists during this period were becoming in 0 01 Fcreasingly involved in the teaching of English as a foreign language. America had now emerged as a major international power. There was a growing demand for foreign expertise in the teaching of English. Thou 0 01 Fsands of foreign students entered the United States to study in univer 0 01 Fsities, and many of these students required training in English before they
during this period sounded similar to the British Oral Approach, although the two traditions developed independently. The American approach differed, however, in its strong alliance with Ameri 0 01 Fcan structural linguistics and its applied linguistic applications, particu 0 01 Flarly contrastive analysis. Fries set forth his principles in Teaching and Learning English as a Foreign Language (1945), in which the problems of learning a foreign language were attributed to the conflict of different structural systems (i.e., differences between the grammatical and pho 0 01 Fnological patterns of the native language and the target language). Con 0 01 Ftrastive analysis of the two languages would allow potential problems of interference to be predicted and addressed through carefully prepared teaching materials. Thus was born a major industry in American applied linguistics — systematic comparisons of English with other languages, with a view toward solving the fundamental problems of foreign lan 0 01 Fguage learning.
The approach developed by linguists at Michigan and other universities became known variously as the Oral Approach, the Aural-Oral Approach, and the Structural Approach. It advocated aural training first, then pronunciation training, followed by speaking, reading, and writing. Language was identified with speech, and speech was approached through structure. This approach influenced the way languages were taught in the United States throughout the 1950s. As an approach to the teaching of English as a foreign language the new orthodoxy was pro 0 01 Fmoted through the University of Michigan's journal Language Learning. This was a period when expertise in linguistics was regarded as a neces 0 01 Fsary and sufficient foundation for expertise in language teaching. Not surprisingly, the classroom materials produced by Fries and linguists at Yale, Cornell, and elsewhere evidenced considerable linguistic analysis but very little pedagogy. They were widely used, however, and the applied linguistic principles on which they were based were thought to incorpo 0 01 Frate the most advanced scientific approach to language teaching. If there was any learning theory underlying the Aural- Oral materials, it was a commonsense application of the idea that practice makes perfect. There is no explicit reference to then-current learning theory in Fries's work. It was the incorporation of the linguistic principles of the Aural-Oral ap 0 01 Fproach with state-of-the-art psychological learning theory in the mid-1950s that led to the method that came to be known as Audiolingualism.
The emergence of the Audiolingual Method resulted from the in 0 01 Fcreased attention
given to foreign language teaching in the United States toward the end of the 1950s. The need for a radical change and rethink 0 01 Fing of foreign language teaching methodology (most of which was still linked to the Reading Method) was prompted by the launching of the first Russian satellite in 1957. The U.S. government acknowledged the need for a more intensive effort to teach foreign languages in order to prevent Americans from becoming isolated from scientific advances made in other countries. The National Defense Education Act (1958), among other measures, provided funds for the study and analysis of modern languages, for the development of teaching materials, and for the training of teachers. Teachers were encouraged to attend summer institutes to improve their knowledge of foreign languages and to learn the principles of linguistics and the new linguistically based teaching methods. Lan 0 01 Fguage teaching specialists set about developing a method that was appli 0 01 Fcable to conditions in U.S. colleges and university classrooms. They drew on the earlier experience of the army programs and the Aural-Oral or Structural Approach developed by Fries and his colleagues, adding in 0 01 Fsights taken from behaviorist psychology. This combination of structural linguistic theory, contrastive analysis, aural-oral procedures, and be 0 01 Fhaviorist psychology led to the Audiolingual Method. Audiolingualism (the term was coined by Professor Nelson Brooks in 1964) claimed tohave transformed language teaching from an art into a science, which would enable learners to achieve mastery of a foreign language effectively and efficiently. The method was widely adopted for teaching foreign languages in North American colleges and universities. It provided the methodological foundation for materials for the teaching of foreign lan 0 01 Fguages at the college and university level in the United States and Canada, and its principles formed the basis of such widely used series as the Lado English Series (Lado 1977) and English 900 (English Language Services 1964). Although the method began to fall from favor in the late 1960s for reasons we shall discuss later, Audiolingualism and materials based on audiolingual principles continue to be used today. Let us examine the features of the Audiolingual Method at the levels of approach, design, and procedure.
Approach
Theory of language
entails mastering the elements or building blocks of the language and learning the rules by which these elements are combined, from phoneme to morpheme to word to phrase to sentence. The phonological system defines those sound elements that contrast meaningfully with one another in the language (phonemes), their phonetic realizations in specific environments (allophones), and their per 0 01 Fmissible sequences (phonotactics). The phonological and grammatical systems of the language constitute the organization of language and by implication the units of production and comprehension. The grammati 0 01 Fcal system consists of a listing of grammatical elements and rules for their linear combination into words, phrases, and sentences. Rule-ordered pro 0 01 Fcesses involve addition, deletion, and transposition of elements. An important tenet of structural linguistics was that the primary me 0 01 Fdium of language is oral: Speech is language. Since many languages do not have a written form and we learn to speak before we learn to read or write, it was argued that language is "primarily what is spoken and only secondarily what is written" (Brooks 1964). Therefore, it was assumed that speech had a priority in language teaching. This was contrary to popular views of the relationship of the spoken and written forms of language, since it had been widely assumed that language existed prin 0 01 Fcipally as symbols written on paper, and that spoken language was an imperfect realization of the pure written version. This scientific approach to language analysis appeared to offer the foundations for a scientific approach to language teaching. In 1961, the American linguist William Moulton, in a report prepared for the 9th International Congress of Linguists, proclaimed the linguistic principles on which language teaching methodology should be based: "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 thinks they ought to say.... Languages are different" (quoted in Rivers 1964: 5). But a method cannot be based simply on a theory of language. It also needs to refer to the psychology of learning and to learning theory. It is to this aspect of Audiolingualism that we now turn.
Theory of learning The language teaching theoreticians and methodologists who developed
Audiolingualism not only had a convincing and powerful theory of lan 0 01 Fguage to draw upon but they were also working in a period when a prominent school of American psychology — known as behavioral psychology — claimed to have tapped the secrets of all human learning, including language learning. Behaviorism, like structural linguistics, is another antimentalist, empirically based approach to the study of human behavior. To the behaviorist, the human being is an organism capable of a wide repertoire of behaviors. The occurrence of these behaviors is depen 0 01 Fdent on three crucial elements in learning: a stimulus, which serves to elicit behavior; a response triggered by a stimulus; and reinforcement, which serves to mark the response as being appropriate (or inappropri 0 01 Fate) and encourages the repetition (or suppression) of the response in the future (see Skinner 1957; Brown 1980). A representation of this can be seen in Figure 4.1. Reinforcement is a vital element in the learning process, because it increases the likelihood that the behavior will occur again and eventually become a habit. To apply this theory to language learning is to identify the organism as the foreign language learner, the behavior as verbal behavior, the stimulus as what is taught or presented of the foreign language, the response as the learner's reaction to the stimulus, and the reinforcement as the extrinsic approval and praise of the teacher or fellow students or the intrinsic self-satisfaction of target language use. Language mastery is represented as acquiring a set of appropriate language stimulus-response chains. The descriptive practices of structural linguists suggested a number of hypotheses about language learning, and hence about language teaching as well. For example, since linguists normally described languages begin 0 01 Fning with the phonological level and finishing with the sentence level, it was assumed that this was also the appropriate sequence for learning and teaching. Since speech was now held to be primary and writing second 0 01 Fary, it was assumed that language teaching should focus on mastery of speech and that writing or even written prompts should be withheld until reasonably late in the language learning process. Since the structure is what is important and unique about a language, early practice should focus on mastery of phonological and grammatical structures rather than on mastery of vocabulary. Out of these various influences emerged a number of learning princi 0 01 Fples, which became the psychological foundations of Audiolingualism and came to shape its methodological practices. Among the more central are the following:
- Foreign language learning is basically a process of mechanical habit formation. Good
Design
Audiolingualists demanded a complete reorientation of the foreign lan 0 01 Fguage curriculum. Like the nineteenth-century reformers, they advocated a return to speech- based instruction with the primary objective of oral proficiency, and dismissed the study of grammar or literature as the goal of foreign language teaching. "A radical transformation is called for, a new orientation of procedures is demanded, and a thorough house clean 0 01 Fing of methods, materials, texts and tests is unavoidable" (Brooks 1964: 50).
Objectives
Brooks distinguishes between short-range and long-range objectives of an audiolingual program. Short-range objectives include training in lis 0 01 Ftening comprehension, accurate pronunciation, recognition of speech symbols as graphic signs on the printed page, and ability to reproduce these symbols in writing (Brooks 1964: 111). "These immediate objec 0 01 Ftives imply three others: first, control of the structures of sound, form, and order in the new language; second, acquaintance with vocabulary items that bring content into these structures; and third, meaning, in terms of the significance these verbal symbols have for those who speak the language natively" (Brooks 1964: 113). Long-range objectives "must be language as the native speaker uses it.... There must be some knowl 0 01 Fedge of a second language as it is possessed by a true bilingualist" (Brooks 1964: 107). In practice this means that the focus in the early stages is on oral skills, with gradual links to other skills as learning develops. Oral proficiency is equated with accurate pronunciation and grammar and the ability to respond quickly and accurately in speech situations. The teaching of listening comprehension, pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary are all related to development of oral fluency. Reading and writing skills may be taught, but they are dependent on prior oral skills. Language is primarily speech in audiolingual theory, but speaking skills are themselves depen 0 01 Fdent on the ability to accurately perceive and produce the major pho 0 01 Fnological features of the target language, fluency in the use of the key grammatical patterns in the language, and knowledge of sufficient vocab 0 01 Fulary to use with these patterns.
The syllabus
Audiolingualism is a linguistic, or structure-based, approach to language teaching. The starting point is a linguistic syllabus, which contains the key items of phonology, morphology, and syntax of the language ar 0 01 Franged according to their order of presentation. These may have been derived in part from a contrastive analysis of the differences between the native language and the target language, since these differences are thought to be the cause of the major difficulties the learner will encounter. In addition, a lexical syllabus of basic vocabulary items is usually spec 0 01 Fified in advance. In Foundations for English Teaching (Fries and Fries 1961), for example, a corpus of structural and lexical items graded into three levels is proposed, together with suggestions as to the situations that could be used to contextualize them. The language skills are taught in the order of listening, speaking, read 0 01 Fing, and writing. Listening is viewed largely as training in aural discrimination of basic sound patterns. The language may be presented entirely orally at first; written representations are usually withheld from learners in early stages.
The learner's activities must at first be confined to the audiolingual and gestural- visual bands of language behavior.... Recognition and discrimination are followed by imitation, repetition and memorization. Only when he is thoroughly familiar with sounds, arrange 0 01 Fments, and forms does he center his attention on enlarging his vocabulary.... Throughout he concentrates upon gaining accuracy before striving for fluency. (Brooks 1964: 50)
When reading and writing are introduced, students are taught to read and write what they have already learned to say orally. An attempt is made to minimize the possibilities for making mistakes in both speaking and writing by using a tightly structured approach to the presentation of new language items. At more advanced levels, more complex reading and writing tasks may be introduced.
Types of learning and teaching activities
Dialogues and drills form the basis of audiolingual classroom practices. Dialogues
Restatement. The student rephrases an utterance and addresses it to someone else, according to instructions.
EXAMPLES Tell him to wait for you. —Wait for me. Ask her how old she is. —How old are you? Ask John when he began. —John, when did you begin? ...
5. Completion. The student hears an utterance that is complete except for one word, then repeats the utterance in completed form. EXAMPLES I'll go my way and you go.... —I'll go my way and you go yours. We all have... own troubles. —We all have our own troubles....
- Transposition. A change in word order is necessary when a word is added.
EXAMPLES I'm hungry. (so). —So am I. I'll never do it again. (neither). —Neither will I....
- Expansion. When a word is added it takes a certain place in the sequence.
EXAMPLES I know him. (hardly). —I hardly know him. I know him. (well). —I know him well....
- Contraction. A single word stands for a phrase or clause.
EXAMPLES Put your hand on the table. —Put your hand there. They believe that the earth is flat. —They believe it....
- Transformation. A sentence is transformed by being made negative or interrogative or through changes in tense, mood, voice, aspect, or modality. EXAMPLES He knows my address. He doesn't know my address. Does he know my address? He used to know my address. If he had known my address.
Integration. Two separate utterances are integrated into one.
EXAMPLES They must be honest. This is important. —It is important that they be honest. I know that man. He is looking for you. —I know the man who is looking for you.... Rejoinder. The student makes an appropriate rejoinder to a given utterance. He is told in advance to respond in one of the following ways: Be polite. Answer the question. Agree. Agree emphatically. Express surprise. Express regret. Disagree.
Disagree emphatically. Question what is said. Fail to understand. BE POLITE. EXAMPLES Thank you. —You're welcome. May I take one? —Certainly. ANSWER THE QUESTION. EXAMPLES What is your name? —My name is Smith. Where did it happen? —In the middle of the street. AGREE. EXAMPLES He's following us. —I think you're right. This is good coffee. —It's very good....
- Restoration. The student is given a sequence of words that have been culled from a sentence but still bear its basic meaning. He uses these words with a minimum of changes and additions to restore the sen 0 01 Ftence to its original form. He may be told whether the time is present, past, or future. EXAMPLES
Show how words relate to meaning in the target language. Get the individual student to talk. Reward trials by the student in such a way that learning is reinforced. Teach a short story and other literary forms. Establish and maintain a cultural island. Formalize on the first day the rules according to which the language class is to be conducted, and enforce them. (Brooks 1964: 143)
The role of instructional materials Instructional materials in the Audiolingual Method assist the teacher to develop language mastery in the learner. They are primarily teacher- oriented. A student textbook is often not used in the elementary phases of a course where students are primarily listening, repeating, and respond 0 01 Fing. At this stage in learning, exposure to the printed word may not be considered desirable, because it distracts attention from the aural input. The teacher, however, will have access to a teacher's book that contains the structured sequence of lessons to be followed and the dialogues, drills, and other practice activities. When textbooks and printed materials are introduced to the student, they provide the texts of dialogues and cues needed for drills and exercises. Tape recorders and audiovisual equipment often have central roles in an audiolingual course. If the teacher is not a native speaker of the target language, the tape recorder provides accurate models for dialogues and drills. A language laboratory may also be considered essential. It provides the opportunity for further drill work and to receive controlled error-free practice of basic structures. It also adds variety by providing an alterna 0 01 Ftive to classroom practice. A taped lesson may first present a dialogue for listening practice, allow for the student to repeat the sentences in the dialogue line by line, and provide follow-up fluency drills on grammar or pronunciation.
Procedure
Since Audiolingualism is primarily an oral approach to language teach 0 01 Fing, it is not surprising that the process of teaching involves extensive oral instruction. The focus of instruction is on immediate and accurate speech; there is little provision for grammatical explanation or talking about the language. As far as possible, the target
language is used as the medium of instruction, and translation or use of the native language is discouraged. Classes of ten or fewer are considered optimal, although larger classes are often the norm. Brooks lists the following procedures that the teacher should adopt in using the Audiolingual Method:
The modeling of all learnings by the teacher. The subordination of the mother tongue to the second language by rendering English inactive while the new language is being learned. The early and continued training of the ear and tongue without recourse to graphic symbols. The learning of structure through the practice of patterns of sound, order, and form, rather than by explanation. The gradual substitution of graphic symbols for sounds after sounds are thor 0 01 Foughly known. The summarizing of the main principles of structure for the student's use when the structures are already familiar, especially when they differ from those of the mother tongue. The shortening of the time span between a performance and the pronounce 0 01 Fment of its rightness or wrongness, without interrupting the response. This enhances the factor of reinforcement in learning. The minimizing of vocabulary until all common structures have been learned. The study of vocabulary only in context. Sustained practice in the use of the language only in the molecular form of speaker- hearer-situation. Practice in translation only as a literary exercise at an advanced level. (Brooks 1964: 142)
In a typical audiolingual lesson, the following procedures would be observed:
- Students first hear a model dialogue (either read by the teacher or on tape) containing the key structures that are the focus of the lesson. They repeat each line of the dialogue, individually and in chorus. The teacher pays attention to pronunciation, intonation, and fluency. Cor 0 01 Frection of mistakes of pronunciation or grammar is direct and imme 0 01 Fdiate. The dialogue is memorized gradually, line by line. A line may be broken down into several phrases if necessary. The dialogue is read aloud in chorus, one half saying one speaker's part and the other half responding. The students do not
characteristically involves innovation, formation of new sentences and patterns in accordance with rules of great abstractness and intricacy" (Chomsky 1966: 153). Chomsky's theory of transformational grammar proposed that the funda 0 01 Fmental properties of language derive from innate aspects of the mind and from how humans process experience through language. His theories were to revolutionize American linguistics and focus the attention of linguists and psychologists on the mental properties people bring to bear on language use and language learning. Chomsky also proposed an alter 0 01 Fnative theory of language learning to that of the behaviorists. Behavior 0 01 Fism regarded language learning as similar in principle to any other kind of learning. It was subject to the same laws of stimulus and response, rein 0 01 Fforcement and association. Chomsky argued that such a learning theory could not possibly serve as a model of how humans learn language, since much of human language use is not imitated behavior but is created anew from underlying knowledge of abstract rules. Sentences are not learned by imitation and repetition but "generated" from the learner's underlying "competence." Suddenly the whole audiolingual paradigm was called into question: pattern practice, drilling, memorization. These might lead to language-like behaviors, but they were not resulting in competence. This created a crisis in American language teaching circles from which a full recovery has not yet been made. Temporary relief was offered in the form of a theory derived in part from Chomsky — cognitive code learning. In 1966, John B. Carroll, a psychologist who had taken a close interest in foreign language teaching, wrote: The audio-lingual habit theory which is so prevalent in American foreign lan 0 01 Fguage teaching was, perhaps fifteen years ago, in step with the state of psycho 0 01 Flogical thinking of that time, but it is no longer abreast of recent develop 0 01 Fments. It is ripe for major revision, particularly in the direction of joining it with some of the better elements of the cognitive-code learning theory. (Car 0 01 Froll 1966a: 105) This referred to a view of learning that allowed for a conscious focus on grammar and that acknowledged the role of abstract mental processes in learning rather than defining learning simply in terms of habit formation. Practice activities should involve meaningful learning and language use. Learners should be encouraged to use their innate and creative abilities to derive and make explicit the underlying grammatical rules of the lan 0 01 Fguage. For a time in the early 1970s there was a considerable interest in the implication of the cognitive-code theory for language teaching (e.g., see
Jakobovits 1970; Lugton 1971). But no clear-cut methodological guidelines emerged, nor did any particular method incorporating this view of learning. The term cognitive code is still sometimes invoked to refer to any conscious attempt to organize materials around a grammati 0 01 Fcal syllabus while allowing for meaningful practice and use of language. The lack of an alternative to Audiolingualism led in the 1970s and 1980s to a period of adaptation, innovation, experimentation, and some confu 0 01 Fsion. Several alternative method proposals appeared in the 1970s that made no claims to any links with mainstream language teaching and second language acquisition research. These included Total Physical Re 0 01 Fsponse, the Silent Way, and Counseling-Learning. These methods at 0 01 Ftracted some interest at first but have not continued to attract significant levels of acceptance. Other proposals since then have reflected develop 0 01 Fments in general education and other fields outside the second language teaching community, such as Whole Language, Multiple Intelligences, Neurolinguistic Programming, Competency-Based Language Teaching, and Cooperative Language Learning. Mainstream language teaching since the 1980s, however, has generally drawn on contemporary theories of language and second language acquisition as a basis for teaching pro 0 01 Fposals. The Lexical Approach, Communicative Language Teaching, the Natural Approach, Content-Based Teaching, and Task-Based Teaching are representative of this last group. The concern for grammatical accu 0 01 Fracy that was a focus of Audiolingualism has not disappeared, however, and continues to provide a challenge for contemporary applied linguistics (see Doughty and Williams 1998).
Conclusion Audiolingualism holds that language learning is like other forms of learn 0 01 Fing. Since language is a formal, rule-governed system, it can be formally organized to maximize teaching and learning efficiency. Audiolingualism thus stresses the mechanistic aspects of language learning and language use. There are many similarities between Situational Language Teaching and Audiolingualism. The order in which the language skills are intro 0 01 Fduced, and the focus on accuracy through drill and practice in the basic structures and sentence patterns of the target language, might suggest that these methods drew from each other. In fact, however, Situational Language Teaching was a development of the earlier Direct Method (see Chapter 1) and does not have the strong ties to linguistics and behavioral
