STARTBODY

Theories, Methods & Techniques of Teaching - Audio Lingualism

 

So what we're going to do is to run through a series of methodologies that were created mainly in the 1900s that adopted the idea that language learning should be much more communicative, much more natural. The first one is called audiolingualism and it's also called the army method because of where it was developed. Basically, psychology, during the 1950s and 60s, was building up new theories about behaviorism. Perhaps the most famous experiments that were done in this particular area were by Pavlov, where he was showing that most animals undergo a stimulus response mechanism and he had a series of famous experiments, where by ringing a bell, he could cause a dog to salivate, that would be his response, in the expectation of getting some food. This behaviorist idea of stimulus response was put into an actual teaching methodology. Basically, in the audiolingualism method these two parts of the name tell us what actually happens. "Audio" is to listen and lingual is to repeat. So what we do is a series of drills and these intensive verbal drills help us to get the use of the particular language.


Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next.

This unit covered the two receptive skills of reading and listening. I think it's hard to strike a balance between the two at times and this unit offered some good advice, such as finding content that students are motivated to learn, pre-teaching select, important vocabulary before beginning any reading or listening activities, and exposing students to both non-authentic and authentic texts. I agree that it's not essential to teach every word for complete understanding, as being able to grasp meanings holistically is as equally important.



ENDBODY