The Audio-lingual Method 听说教学法

The Audio-lingual Method is a method of foreign or second language teaching which emphasizes the teaching of speaking and listening before reading and writing. In the Audio-lingual Method, mother tongue speech is discouraged in the classroom. The Audio-lingual Method uses dialogues as the main form of language presentation and drills as the main training techniques. It also consists of lots of error correction and emphasizes practicing language patterns and perfect pronunciation. It encourages students to practice sentence structures repeatly in order to develop the listening and speaking ability. During the World War II, American department of defense invited the linguists to develop plans for training the talented people.

The Audio-lingual Method is formed by the influence of American Structuralists. From 1940s structural linguistics, mathematical linguistics, psycholinguistics, control theory and behavioral psychology interpenetrate, and the interpenetrating subject develops, foreign language teaching puts reliance on the modern technology increasingly. The experts in teaching approach in every country work out new teaching system one after another, which provide a basis for The Audio-lingual Method.

The theoretical foundation is the American Structuralists. This method emphasizes the second language should be learned from the spoken language, grammar and language structure of the target language. American Structuralists emphasize that the language description, which look the language as a habit of stimulus and reflects. The feature of Audio-lingual Method is that it can make the students become the center. Through extensive listening and speaking practice, students could master the grammar roles. It rarely uses mother language or translation.

Its advantages are as followed. The Audio-lingual Method looks the spoken language as the center to cultivate mainly listening and speaking abilities, emphasizes the training of sentence structures to create a set of basic training method of listening, speaking, reading and writing, restricts the use of mother tongue, but does not exclude the role of mother tongue and uses the modern audio-visual means to teach.

The disadvantages are stressing the listening and speaking, but neglecting the reading and writing. It is a boring mechanical operation and the sentence drills are out of context and it is not conductive to create communicative competence.