-
Definition of Audio-lingual Method
< br>（
American
）
?
a method of
foreign or second Language teaching which
emphasizes the teaching of
speaking and
listening before reading and writing;
mother tongue is discouraged
in the classroom.
Historical and social background
I Prompted by WWII
?
The
Audio-
lingual
Method
is
in
origin
mainly
American.
The
Audio-lingual
Method
was
developed
in
the
U.S.
during
the
Second
World
War.
At
that
time,
the
U.S.
government
found it a
great
necessity to
set
up
a special
language training program
to
supply
the
war
with
language
personnel
who
could
speak
fluently
in
German,
French,
Italian,
Chinese
and
other
languages.
The
objectives
of
the
army
program
were
for
students to
attain
conversational
proficiency
in a variety of foreign
languages.
?
The
of
the
Army
Method
was
derived
form
the
intensity
of
contact
with
L2
rather than from any well-developed
methodological basis.
?
The
Audiolingua
l
Method
is
also
known
as
the
“informant
method”,
since
it
used
a
native speaker
of the language, the informant, and a
linguist.
?
The informant served as a
source of language for imitation, and the linguist
supervised
the learning experience.
II Academic
Promotion
?
In
1941
the
first
English
Language
Institute
in
the
U.S.
was
established
in
the
University of Michigan.
The director of the institute was Charles Fries,
who applied the
principles of
structural linguistics to LT. The result is an
approach which advocated
aural
training first, then pronunciation
training
, followed by speaking, reading
and writing.
?
The emergence of the Audio-
lingual
Method
resulted from
the increased attention to
FLT in the U.S. towards the end of the
1950s.
1
III
Political Promotion
?
The need for a radical
change and rethinking of FLTM was promoted by the
launching
of
the
1
st
Russian
satellite
i
n
US
government
acknowledged
the
need
for
a
more
intensive
effort
to
teach
a
foreign
language
in
order
to
prevent
American
from
becoming isolated from scientific
advances made in other countries.
IV
the Outcome
?
This
need
made
LT
specialists
set
about
developing
a
method
that
was
applicable
to
conditions
in
U.S.
college
and
university
classrooms.
They
draw
on
the
earlier
experiences
of
the
army
programmes
and
the
Aural-Oral
or
Structural
Approach
developed
by
Fries
and
his
colleagues,
adding
insights
taken
from
behaviourist
psychology.
?
Structural
linguistics
views language as a system
of structurally related elements (such
as
phonemes,
morphemes,
words,
structure,
and
sentence
types)
for
the
expression
of
meaning.
?
The
grammatical system consists of a list of
grammatical elements and rules for their
linear combination into words, phrases
and sentences.
?
According
to
a
structural
view,
language
has
the
following
characteristics
in
the
Audiolingual Method:
(1)Elements in a language are produced
in a rule-governed (structured ) way.
(2)Language
samples
could
be
exhaustively
described
at
any
structural
level
of
description.
(3)Language
is
structured
like
a
pyramid,
that
is,
linguistic
levels
are
system
within
systems.
?
The
structural linguists believed that the primary
medium of language is
oral.
This
view
of
language
offered
the
foundations
for
the
Audio-
lingual
Method
in
language
teaching in which
speech was given in a priority.
?
The Audio-lingual Method is
the first theories to recommend the development of
a language teaching theory
on declared linguistic and psychological
principles.
Theory
Theory of
learning
2