AUDIO-LINGUAL METHOD

Drawbacks

Author

What is it?

Main contributions

AUDIO-LINGUALMETHOD

Characteristics of learning process

(ALM)

Materials

Yolanda Gimenoand Laia Villarroya

Techniques and activities

Role of the students

Goal and role of the teacher

Techniques and activities

• Dialogue memorization
• Expansion drill
• Repetition drill
• Chain drill
• Single-slot and multiple-slot substitution drill
• Transformation drill
• Question and answer drill
• Use of minimal pairs
• Complete the dialogue
• Language laboratory activities (grammar game)

Dialogue memorization

Students memorize the dialog through mimicry: students often take the role of one person in the dialog, and the teacher the other. After the students have learned the one person’s lines, they switch roles and memorize the other person’s part. Another way of practicing the two roles is for half of the class to take one role and the other half to take the other. After the dialog has been memorized, pairs of individual students might perform the dialog for the rest of the class.

Expansion drill

This drill is used when a long line of a dialog is giving students trouble. The teacher breaks down the line into several and smaller parts and adds more words of the sentence each time.

Repetition drill

Students are asked to repeat the teacher’s model as accurately and as quickly as possible. This drill is often used to teach the lines of the dialog.

Chain drill

It gives students an opportunity to say the lines individually. Gets its name from the chain of conversation that forms around the room as students, one-by-one, ask and answer questions of each other. This gives the teacher an opportunity to check each student’s speech.

Single-slot and multiple-slot substitution drill

The teacher says a line, usually from the dialog they are working about. Next, the teacher says a word or a phrase -called the cue. The students must recognize what part of speech the cue word is and where it fits into the sentence. An example of this drill is: The teacher says: “I am going to the post office”. After that, she said the word “She”. Students have to know that “She” is a subject and change the part of the sentence which is appropriate. The sentence would be “She is going to the post office”. Then, the teacher says “the park”; and students have to do the same, change the place where the character is going: “She is going to the park”.

Transformation drill

It asks students to change one type of sentence into another -affirmative sentence into a negative, active sentence into a passive, etc-. Exemples: all the time the teacher uses pictures to go with her talks.

-“She is going to the post office” - “Is she going to the post office?” -“Are you going to the football field?” - “Yes, I am going to the football field” -“Are you going to the bus station?” - “No, I am going to the supermarket”. In this one, they are required to look at the picture and listen to the question and answer negatively if the place in the question is not the same as what they see in the picture.

Question and answer drill

This drill gives students practice with answering questions. The students should answer the teacher’s questions very quickly.

Use of minimal pairs

The teacher works with pairs of words which differ in only one sound; for example, “ship/sheep”. Students are first asked to perceive the difference between the two words and later to be able to say the two words. The teacher selects the sounds to work on after she has done a contrastive analysis, a comparison between the students’ native language and the language they are studying.

Complete the dialogue

Selected words are erased from the dialog students have learned. They complete the dialog by filling the blanks with the missing words.

Language laboratory activities (grammar game)

The games are designed to get students to practice a grammar point within a context. Students are able to express themselves, where repetition is also present. For example, the “supermarket alphabet game”. The game starts with a student who needs a food item beginning with the letter A. He says “I am going to the supermarket. I need a few apples”. The next student says, “I am going to the supermarket. He needs a few apples. I need a little bread” (or any other food item you could find in the supermarket beginning with the letter B. The game continues with each player adding an item that begins with the next letter in the alphabet. Before adding his own item, each player must mention the items of the other students before him.