Efl teaching grammar

The Audio lingual Method
Howatt and Widdowson’s (2004) book on the history of ELT is very comprehensive ;they look back at the history of ELT from medieval times to the present, and offer not only a scientific framework, but also take into consideration political and institutional aspects that have influenced ELT throughout the years. Certainly, World War II played a decisive role in the development of the Oral Approach in America, known under the name Audio lingualism, the dominant method from the mid-fifties to approximately1970. In a sense, the war made the world more global; American soldiers and personnel got to meet people from new countries face-to-face and thus new languages such as German, Italian and Japanese. The Army Specialized Training Program, established in1942, was to take care of the language training needed. The program was extremely intensive and did in fact have impressive results. Thus, an oral-based approach involving intensive drills was to become one of the main pillars of Audio-lingualism. Simultaneously, waves of immigrants coming to America had to learn the target language English. Language programs and institutions, and specialization and research, were to revolutionize ELT for years to come.⁷
The American method had a lot in common with the British Oral Approach, but also differed from it in a substantial way; it had strong links to structural linguistics and applied linguistics. Bloomfield’s ideas about putting language into a system expressed in his book Language from 1933 had a strong impact on the development of structuralism. Nevertheless, Fries (1945, 1952) and Lado (1957, 1964) were the most prominent proponents of the application of structuralism, and the branch of applied linguistics called contrastive analysis, to ELT.
In structural linguistics, attention is paid to sentences and their constituents.
Grammar was again open for explanations, albeit shorter explanations, and of course not before the sentences had been practiced orally. “Teach the language, not about the language” was the catch-phrase. Sentences were put into substitution tables and practiced over and over again, preferably in language laboratories, in order to let the learners listen to their own pronunciation as well. In a substitution table, the grammatical functions of words were easily identifiable. As shown in the figure, after oral practice of the sentences learners could observe for example that here has the same function as on the table, namely adverbial.

There’s a dog over there.
There’s a book on the table.
There was a book in my bag yesterday.
There were some men here two weeks ago.

An example of a substitution table

2.