3. Problems with methods. Approaches, Methods and Techniques Approach

The audio-lingual methods are considered to be contemporary ones. During the second World War, army programmes were set up to teach American military personnel languages such as German, French, Japanese and Tagalot. Strong emphasis was placed on aural-oral training.The Audio-lingual Method developed from these programmes. This method was also influenced by behavioral psychologists who believed that foreign language learning is basically a process of Mechanical habit formation.

It could be said that this method consist entirely of drilling in one form or another.

Audio-lingual means “Listening-speaking”. Another name for the method is the confusing homophony of the phrase aural-oral. The method consist of presenting an oral model to the student, on tape or on the teacher‘s voice, and caring out a series of pattern drills based on the model.

In the audio-lingual method, skills are taught in the natural order of acquisition: listening, reading, speaking and writing. Audio-lingual classes begin with a dialogue which introduces the lesson’s sentence patterns. The students memorize this dialogue then practice grammar patterns in drill such as listen and repeat substitution, chain and transformation. Accuracy in pronunciation is emphasized and festered through minimal pair drills where students learn to differentiate between sounds such the vowels in “ship” and “sheep”, “bit” and “beat” and “hit” and “heat”. Lessons are sequenced according to grammatical complexity. Translation, considered to cause interference from the mother tongue, is not allowed. Learning is tightly controlled by the teacher, who follows the text closely.

Summary.
Audio-lingual approach is a reaction to the Reading Approach; much is taken from the Direct Method, the rest from behaviorism.

1. New material is presented in dialogue form.

2. There is dependence on mimicry, memorization of set phrases and over learning (i.e. it is believed that language learning is habit formation).

3.Structures are sequenced and taught one at a time.

4. Structural patterns are taught using repetitive drills.

5. There is little or no grammatical explanation: grammar is taught by inductive analogy rather than deductive explanation.

6. Skills are sequenced listen, speak, read and write.

7. Vocabulary is strictly limited and learned in context.

8. Teaching points are determined by contrastive analysis.
9. There is much use of tapes. Language labs and visual aids.
10. There is an extended pre-reading period at the beginning of the course.
11. Great importance is attached to pronunciation with special attention being paid to intonation.
12. The cultural background of the target language is stressed.
13. Some use of the mother- tongue by teachers is permitted.
14. Successful responses are immediately reinforced.
15. There is a great effort to prevent student errors.
16. There is a tendency to manipulate language and disregard content.

The following principles:

a)Students should first listen, then speak, and finally write the language.
(An extreme forms of this method, students had to listen for many hours before they were allowed to speak).

b) The “Grammar” should be presented in the form of modal patterns or dialogues. Drilling consisted of forming new utterances on the basis of the original pattern. This was called “analogous pattern drilling”. That is the students formed the new utterances by analogy.

c) Drilling should follow the stimulus response reinforcement scheme.
Students should always be awarded when they responded correctly, by seeing that they had got the answer right.

d) Students should proceed by very easy steps, starting with simple repetition and going on to simple drills, then more complex drills and so on. Ideally the possibility of a student making an error should be avoided altogether, because positive reinforcement (reward) was considered more effective than negative reinforcement (punishment). This principle was called error prevention.

e) By repeating the stages of stimulus response reinforcement,students would develop correct language habits. Once a habit had been formed, a student could produce examples of the pattern effortlessly and without thinking about how to do so. The student was then regarded as being fluent in that pattern.