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Date Posted: 13:13:54 05/29/07 Tue
Author: Rodrigo Isaac
Subject: Task 3

Procedures on Audio-Lingual Learning

The Audio-Lingual method (also named Army method) was one greatly used way to teach a foreign language. The main objective of this method is to induct an apprentice student to communicate with proficiency through his/her learning of a system of reinforcement which should be based on the correct use of the target language. A basic premise to this type of learning is the fact that firstly the student should train his/her oral skills (Talking and listening) and only after that exposed to reading and writing. In a behavioristic fashion, the scholars that supported this theory believed that writing is easy to learn when the oral skills of the students were internalized and automated.
In the middle of 20th century, this method was largely used, mainly by American Soldiers in The Second World War and Vietnam War and it was reinforced mainly through dialogues and drills (listening and repeating exercise). Even though the method began to fall in late 20th century it is broadly used nowadays. In the next paragraphs will be presented the procedures used in this method.
Usually there is a book to guide the course and the content of it is divided in lessons, and each one of them has some situations, that present to the students a new vocabulary and structures that must be learned. The dialogues are divided in groups and the lessons are presented through audio and video. In the first procedure, the teacher shows the first pictures of the situation and makes questions about it to the students to produce in them some expectation for the lesson. After the questions, the teacher shows more pictures to the students. Through this step, the students try to discover what situation had been depicted and also try to understand by themselves some words and phrases. The second procedure aspires to guide the students to understand the meaning of the issues presented in the lesson. The teacher explains the new words and expressions in the pictures in order to make it comprehensible to the students. In these presented procedures the major importance element is an attempt to force the knowledge experience of the student and if this student can apply his/her knowledge in a different language.
The third procedure is concerned with the oral skills of the students. They listen and repeat dialogs many times until they achieve a pronunciation like a “native.” This procedure is the main proposal of the method because at that time (1960s, 1970s) was possible to hear by audio-tapes the sounds uttered by native speakers and was a general agreement that try to imitate the natives were easy and quickly with this method.
The forth procedure is related with the acquisition of the target language through memorization. In this procedure the students were exposed to hear the dialogs and memorize them generating an automatism. Draws, videos and sounds were used largely to create this effect on the students.
The fifth procedure is substitution exercises like for example change one word in a sentence every time: the book is on the table, the pen is on the table, the box is under the table, the chair is between the tables. This kind of exercise is called drills. At that time were published many books with drills exercises, one example is the “English in Tables” written by F. G. French.
The final procedures are reading and writing. In this stage the students were able to read a small text related with the given lesson and probably write some short sentences. At this point the lessons were finished with some grammatical construction or feature “internalized” by the students.
A final remark is the fact that even today we have a lot of features of this old fashioned method in books and mainly on multimedia softwares (e.g. SuperMemo 2006), and like all methods we have good and bad points to deal with in a process of learning a language.

References:

French, F. G. 1960. English in Tables: A Set of Blue-Prints for Sentence Builders. London: Oxford University Press.
Pimsleur, P. 1967. A memory schedule. Modern Language Journal, 51, 73-75.
http://tesl-ej.org/ej40/m1.html

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