Audio Lingual Method

The Audiolingual Method is one of the earliest and most established methods of teaching second languages. This method mainly focuses on communicative competence with limited and common communicative structures.

Key concept

The Audio-Lingual Method is called the Army Method. In ALM, mainly three things are emphasized such as

1. Certain habit formation through repetition and reinforcement.
2. Structural linguistics that means formal language, is emphasized.
3. No explicit grammar instruction which means that in ALM, the syntactic explanation of a sentence is not given. 

Brief history

The Audio Lingual Method originated during the Second World War. Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) was established in 1942 to develop American soldiers’ foreign language communicative skills.

Objective or Purpose:

1. To attain conversational skills in a foreign language.
2. To increase demands for English courses for foreign students.
3. To develop communicative competence in learners.

Key features:

1. Dialogue is the main feature of ALM.
2. Memorization of sentence structure.
3. Repetition drill for memorizing sentence patterns.
4. No explanation of grammar.
5. Limited vocabulary.
6. Emphasize on phonetics.
7. Target language-based teaching method.
8. Very little use or no use of mother tongue.
9. Introducing language laboratory.

Techniques:

1. Language is taught through dialogues with useful use of vocabulary and common structures of communication. For example

Complex structure: This letter has been sent to you by Mr. Shihab.

Common structure: Mr. Shihab sends you this letter.

1. Memorization of dialogue line by line through repetition drills.
2. Native like phonetics.
3. Natural teaching method because reading and writing are taught after the listening and speaking stages.
4. Perfect participation since there are enough question-answering sessions in ALM.
5. Inductive grammar teaching: The inductive grammar teaching method is applied in ALM. Inductive grammar teaching means that grammar is not taught with an explanation of the syntactic process. Rather, the learners must identify the grammar and structure with an inference or guess of the sentence structure. For example:

• I went there

• He went there

• You went there

• They went there

• We went there

From the above sentences, the learners can understand that there is no necessity of changing the verb in past simple tenses whatever the subject is.

Advantages or strengths: advantages or strengths are the contexts of ALM.

1. Development of listening and speaking power.
2. Correct pronunciation.
3. Large class size could be maintained.
4. Limited useful vocabulary.
5. Lucrative for average students.
6. Participation of the learners.

Disadvantages or limitations:

1. Equal importance is not given to all four skills at the time.
2. Meaning is neglected.
3. Teacher dominated method.
4. A mechanical method because of only pattern practice and memorization.
5. Profitable for the hard-working learners.

However, it is transparent that the Audio Lingual Method cannot be neglected altogether because the low proficiency learners could be much benefited by this method. Even semi-educated learners are benefit takers in the case of learning the target language.