英语教学法之Audiolingual Method(听说法)

Definition of Audio-lingual Method （American）v 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 WWIIv 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.v The methodology of the Army Method was derived form the intensity of contact with L2 rather than from any well-developed methodological basis.v The Audiolingual Method is also known as the “informant method”, since it used a native speaker of the language, the informant, and a linguist. v The informant served as a source of language for imitation, and the linguist supervised the learning experience. II Academic Promotionv 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.v The emergence of the Audio-lingual Method resulted from the increased attention to FLT in the U.S. towards the end of the 1950s. III Political Promotion v The need for a radical change and rethinking of FLTM was promoted by the launching of the 1st Russian satellite in 1957.The 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 Outcomev 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 theirlinear 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. Thisview 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.TheoryTheory of learning Like structural linguistics, behaviorism is also anti-mentalistic, that is, it does not believe that a human being possesses a mind which has consciousness, ideas, etc, and that the mind can influence the behavior of the body. Behaviorism tires to explain how an external event (a stimulus) caused a change in the behavior of an individual (a response) without using concepts like “mind” or “ideas” or any kind of mental behavior. Behaviorist psychology states that human and animal behavior can and should be studied in terms of physical processes only. To the behaviorists, the human being is an organism capable of a wide repertoire of behaviors. occurrence of these behaviors is dependent upon three crucial elements in learning: stimulus response reinforcement According to the Audio-lingual Method, learning consists of stimulus-response connections. According to the Audio-lingual Method, learning is described as the formation of association between responses. To apply this theory to language learning is to identify the organism as the FL learner, the behavior as verbal behavior, the stimulus as what is taught (language input), the response as the learners reaction to the stimulus, and the reinforcement as the approval or praise (or discouragement) of the teacher or students. According to this behaviorist psychology, learning a language is a process of acquiring a set of appropriate language stimulus-response chains, a mechanical process of habit formation. This theory of learning is particularly associated with the American psychologist B.F. Skinner-a famous Harvard behaviorist who believes that verbal behavior is the same as any other fundamental respect of non-verbal behavior. According to the behaviorist, a habit is formed when a correct response to a stimulus is consistently rewarded. The habit therefore is the result of stimulus, correct response and reward occurring again and again. According to Skinner, reward was much more effective than punishment in a teaching situation. In an audiolingual classroom, teachers are encouraged to show approval for each and every correct performance by their students, and every drill is designed so that the possibility of making mistakes is minimized, engineering success for the students. Basic theoretical principles ( theory of language) The five slogans (Moulton, 1961) which express the basic theoretical principles of the Audiolingual Method. They reflect the influence of structural linguistics and behaviorist psychology in language teaching: language is speech, not writing; a language is what its native speakers say, not what someone thinks they ought to say; languages are different; a language is a set of habits; teach the language, not about the language is a principle of the Audio-lingual Method. This five principles became the tenets of language teaching doctrine during the post-war decades.RolesLearner rolesv Lessons in the classroom focus on the correct imitation of the teacher by the learners. Not only are the learners expected to produce the correct output, but attention is also paid to correct pronunciation. Although correct grammar is expected in usage, no explicit grammatical instruction is given. Furthermore, the target language is the only language to be used in the classroom. Teacher rolesv The Audio-lingual Method is a teacher- dominated model where the teacher role is most crucial in the instruction of the language.v According to the linguist Brooks “a teacher ” must be trained to introduce, sustain and harmonize the learning of the four skills in this order : learning, speaking, reading , writing “ and in the Audio-lingual Method , the teacher “controls the direction and pace and monitors and corrects the learners performance ”Instructional materialv Active verbal interactions between teachers and learners and use of materials such as tape recorders and audiovisuals equipments to assist the teacher in the classroom play a central role in teaching a second language.v In Audio-lingual Method the target language should be the medium of in