Job Discussion Forums

[OzBurn]

The Audio-Lingual Method

There is some misinformation about the audio-lingual method posted on Dave�s and elsewhere. I am not an expert on this method, but I do know something about it and have found some ALM techniques quite useful � esp. the drills.

ALM can rapidly boost students� aural comprehension and also their ability to speak fluently. It is not just listen �n repeat, contrary to what you may have read on this board.

A typical ALM lesson begins with a dialogue. The students may or may not be asked to memorize it. The teacher goes over any difficult points and helps the student master the intonation. The dialogue deals with a particular context � usually one of communication, but it also features certain points of structure that will be expanded later in the lesson. After the dialogue has been studied, the student usually does oral drills. This is followed by expansions of the subject, which may take the form of a grammar study, with diagrams on the board, or perhaps communicative activities. Finally, there would be reading and writing assignments, often done at home to reinforce the mostly oral lesson.

The oral drills, which are the heart of the audio-lingual method, take several forms. A typical form is the substitution drill. In such a drill, the student is asked to repeat a sentence, then given new words or phrases that fit into �slots� in the sentence. Here is a simple example:

T: Mike went to the store for some milk. (Students repeat.)
T: butter
S: Mike went to the store for some butter.
T: My sister
S: My sister went to the store for some butter.
etc.

Other variations would include, for example, having the student change the verb, the subject, the prepositional phrase, the object of the preposition, and so on.

This works well to teach adverb placement, subject-verb agreement, and other difficult areas. It is fast and interactive, and you can have the whole class respond, which lets everyone get a chance for a lot of practice. It also builds up the students� speaking and listening skills, which have to be automatic to have any practical value (as you already know if you have taught English or studied a foreign language).

Transformation drills involve changing a sentence in some way. For example, you say a statement, and the students transform it into a question, e.g.:

T: John has a car.
S: Does John have a car?

You could continue like this, or work in variations such as:

T: John bought a car last week. When.
S: When did John buy a car?

Students could also combine two sentences, e.g.:

T: John didn�t like cats. Sue didn�t like cats.
S: John didn�t like cats, and neither did Sue.

OR

T: I know a man. He works at OPT Bank. He works as a clerk.
S: I know a man who works as a clerk at OPT Bank.

Expansion drills have students build a sentence from pieces supplied by the teacher (of course it could be done in pairs if set up properly).

T: My sister goes to school.
S: My sister goes to school.
T: five days a week.
S: My sister goes to school five days a week.
T: and brother.
S: My sister and brother go to school five days a week.

A �meaningful drill� for vocabulary might look like this:

T: Where would you go if you needed a bandage?
S: to a pharmacy. (OR: I�d go to a pharmacy.)
T: Where would you go if you needed a soccer ball?
S: to a sporting goods store.
T: Where would you go if you needed a chair?
S: to a furniture store.

Etc.

A criticism of the above drill is that all the students need to do is listen to the last phrase, then answer with the kind of store that sells it. In fact, this is generally a criticism that is leveled at ALM drills: You can do them with a minimum of thought. That is true. However, it is also true that students who do focus on the content and meaning, not just the structure, learn more with this method than the other students in the class -- and that is true of any method. Also, you can vary the drill to say, for example, What would do if you saw a crime? (Students would learn the response, I�d call the police, or some such; or, if you wanted to make it more open-ended, you could let them respond as they wish, having taught them four or five plausible responses, and letting them choose from those or making up another of their choice.) Then: What would you do if you got two free tickets to see your favorite band? (Students respond, e.g., I�d call my best friend.)

My own view, and I think a stronger weakness in the method the way it was too often used, is that some ALM drills could be performed without thinking about the grammar point supposedly being taught, and that is a much more potent criticism. For example, the teacher may drill adverbs of frequency using substitution drills, and all the students have to remember in such a context is "put the new word in the same place as the other word we substituted."

That said, I should say that I have seen ALM drills make a huge difference in students� auditory comprehension. They also work well for drilling difficult points of grammar. The point that ALM theorists like to make is that many aspects of a foreign language must become habits, rather than something to be pondered, talked about, or measured by written tests of grammar.

ALM theorists specialized in teaching habits of correct and fluent speech, rather than in the nuances of communication, or fancy motivational activities involving knowledge gaps. That isn�t fashionable nowadays. But what they did worked, for the most part, and many teachers who haven�t a clue as to how to teach these skills would be well-advised to study the classics of the audio-lingual method (most of which are out of print).

The audio-lingual method can be used badly, like any other method. You have to use it appropriately, use it in the right doses, and supplement it with communicative activities, extensive reading, etc. But it is and was a serious approach to language learning that, at its best, effectively and quickly taught students (even shy ones) how to speak and understand a foreign language. That is more than one can say of communicative language teaching.

It is interesting to note in this regard that the only self-study methods that have survived for decades on the free market for home study, besides the Pimsleur courses, are audio-lingual courses that were developed in the 1960s and 1970s. See, for example, Multi-Lingual Books� web site, which sells overwhelmingly Pimsleur and audio-lingual courses. And the Pimsleur courses borrow significantly from the audio-lingual method.

[leeroy]

Nice OP Ozborn - I agree 100%.

Audio-Lingual type activities are not "trendy" in the way the communicative methods are now - much of it is inherently teacher-focused which goes in direct contradiction to what most are taught on their CELTA.

I find that Asian learners specifically respond well to the kind of things you have listed, skeptics might argue that this is because it doesn't require them to think - I would see it as more compatible with their Confucian style of learning (i.e. Do Exactly What The Teacher Says). It sometimes seems that students here in London are bored s***less with the "chat with your partner about your weekend" type approaches - the Direct Method certainly does seem more concrete, and in some ways more "ballsy". It's nice to walk into the class and say "Here's the language, here's what it means, here's when and how you use it - now GO!"

(I wonder how many dashes, commas and speech marks I can fit into one paragraph?)

It is easy and fun to teach language in the ways that you have described - though I admit that I find it harder using this style as the students' levels get higher.

[OzBurn]

Advanced grammar can be readily taught using ALM; though as you indicate, most of the class should be devoted to communicative exercises, vocabulary-building (probably emphasizing strategies), and intensive reading. There's not a lot of room for ALM in the latter areas.

Advanced grammar does use a lot fairly complicated structures, which it is hard for students to retain auditorily in drills -- e.g., the example I gave above with relative clauses would be hard to process, I think, just because of its length. I ran into difficulty here with "so" and "neither," and also with unreal conditionals. Students had to work very hard to master these forms. But a lot of this difficulty may be illusory. At my school, it turned out that the students typically hadn't mastered the early stages of grammar, so I was trying to build advanced skills on a shaky (or non-existent) foundation. Unfortunately the school wanted me to teach from the rather silly Inside Out and World Club (ugh) books and also refused to buy any supplementary grammar texts or allow copying. After a while I just went ahead and did what I needed to do, but one cannot review everything in a year. And it is harder to teach students who have learned something the wrong way than it is to teach students who never learned it at all.

From what I have seen and heard, many advanced classes could also do with quite a bit of pronunciation practice, apparently a much-neglected area; and there are some good ALM materials for teaching pronunciation.

My experience in Hungary is that the younger children enjoy ALM drills, so long as they do not continue too long (more than ten minutes or so); but some of the older ones tend to object that the content is too "hard" (compared to gassing about one's weekend or favorite movies, it is). They also seem to perceive some of the remedial work they have to do as somewhat infantile. The fact that they may not have not mastered primer-level grammar often means little to them, since their previous teachers didn't mind. I think I might like teaching in Asia, where it seems that there are fewer problems of this kind.

My attitude towards the radical version of the communicative method has been shaped by my experience here, where, for example, most of the older students of Spanish still haven't learned the present tense of estar, despite six years of instruction, or should I say communicative language activities. If they had been taught with ALM, it is hard to believe that they would be so hopelessly far behind and so habituated to basic errors. (I taught myself 70 lessons of Pimsleur Spanish, and studied Teach Yourself Spanish for a couple of months, and I know more Spanish than most of the students at this school who have been here for over five years.)

[biffinbridge]

Back teaching Arabs again using 'Streamline'(AL method).While much of what's been said contains truth, I must say that the audio-lingual approach is dull,teacher centred and almost impossible with very large classes.

[OzBurn]

It is necessary to spice up drills as much as possible with varied tone of voice, a sense of humour, frequent changes of pace, and praise. However, there is no getting around the fact that some tasks that need to be learned are inherently a bit dull and can only be spiced up to a limited degree. Well, practicing technical exercises on the guitar is dull, too, but it helps you play better. Most people need to do it if they want to get good at the guitar.

If the students at this school had gone through a solid primer course and learned the basics at the beginning, they would find English (and Spanish) much more interesting now. Instead, years into it, they struggle with the present tense of *estar*, trying to read articles that are way beyond them, and listening to tapes of conversations that they cannot understand. (Ooh, let's call it "listening for gist.") Trying to entertain students at every moment can lead to a long-range boredom, the boredom of failure, that is quite insufferable.

There are quite a few students at this school who have had six or seven years of CLT English and speak and understand less than 200 words of English (some are worse than that). Even the best students typically acquired an average of only about two words a day until they got to my class.

I would question the view that being "teacher-centred" is a fault. To me, the key point is that it works to teach the skill.

[guest of Japan]

I agree fully with Biffinbridge. I was also under the assumption that the reason Audiolingualism died out was because it produced learners who couldn't communicate in the target language outside of a classroom setting. I don't dislike drills. I find them useful in developing pronunciation skills and helping students to acquire the rhythm of the target language. However, very little learned leaves the classroom. It does however give students the illusion that they can speak the target language fluently. Drills are really nothing more than an exercise in short term memory. It takes a very determined student to actually make any really noticable language progress under this system.

[OzBurn]

Transfer of training, as it is called, is a key issue with any system of instruction and in any discipline: EFL, math, physics, whatever. It is certainly true that drills, by themselves, will not ensure that the skills learned will transfer to situations outside the classroom. In fact, by themselves, they won't even ensure that the skills learned are transferred to situations inside the classroom -- that is, to larger and less-structured tasks. These are all valid critiques of the ALM system -- or would be, if that system merely used drills, and nothing else. However, I don't think that was the case with the better ALM programs, or is the case now. There is certainly a role for communicative activities to reinforce what was learned in a drill, to show the student a social context in which it could be applied, and to help bridge the gap to less-structured situations. In fact, I would consider these activities vital.

That said, you still have to get the students to learn what you are trying to teach *in the first place*, and a well-structured drill can do that quickly, efficiently, and clearly. What is the alternative? "Eliciting" from the brightest students in the class? Hoping that the students "notice" a grammatical pattern based on listening to a few examples on a cassette or studying them in a book? How long do these activities take, and how successful are *they* in transferring what is learned to a situation outside the classroom?

You may think, Oh, no, the student from whom I elicited skill X really *does* transfer it better. But that, I suspect, is largely an illusion. It isn't that the elicitee doesn't do better than others; he does. But the student from whom one elicits something, nine times out of ten, knew it already. You just got a display of that skill. Also, those students, as a rule, are the brightest and best at language learning. Even on the rare occasions when one seems successfully to elicit from a less capable student, the item elicitied was almost certainly already known or (for reasons that generally remain mysterious) relatively easy for him.

I was just reading Harmer's book on learning how to teach English. He is certainly a pretty enthusiastic advocate of CLT. However, in his introduction, he notes that one of the most successful language-learning programs ever was the US Army's WWII training programs, which served as the basis for subsequent ALM programs. He calls these programs, if memory serves, "fantastically" effective. I'd call that transfer outside the classroom.

The students with whom I have used ALM drills have massively improved their listening comprehension, in particular. I see this in and out of the classroom. Their parents report changes. They say that they can watch movies and understand them, get by in foreign countries where they have to speak English (Hungarian not being widely spoken outside of this republic), and so on. That is transfer of training.

Drills, to be effective, have to be repeated with certain techniques until the student is *firm*, which means that the student can respond accurately and without hesitation 95-100% of the time. Most ALM teachers, I suspect, don't get this far. But I was trained that way, in another system, that insists on this point and on what is called overlearning, or fluency. When the drill is conducted in this way, the likelihood of transfer massively increases.

Other ways of ensuring transfer are reading and writing assignments that demand use of the new content or structures. Review also helps.

I have seen many cleverly designed activities in CLT-focused textbooks and articles. They are certainly an excellent contribution to the learning of English. And ALM courses were too dry, and didn't have enough of these kinds of application. I am not against CLT; it certainly has its place, and it has enhanced the toolkit that the teacher can bring to the job. However, that doesn't make me blind to its deficiencies or convince me that the decades of work in ALM has nothing to offer.