Audiolingual Method

 Hi everyone! Welcome to another entry of my English Didactics blog😊

Today I will give you some information about the Audiolingual Method.

It was created during the World War II due to the necessity of the armies to learn the language of their enemies and their allies, therefore this method is also called the Army Method. While the soldiers were learning the language they were taught only specific words they needed to survive, they didn't fully learn the language nor were they having conversations in the target language, they needed to learn it to survive so they would memorize specific commands.

This method focuses on developing listening and speaking skills rather than reading and writing and it is all about memorizing and repetition, the audiolingual method might be used as part of individual lessons and not so much as whole class. 

It is said that the GTM and the Direct method are the parents of the Audiolingual method since it is a mixture of what each method works with, for example, error correction is also important in this method like it is in the GTM but the Army method works the listening and speaking skills like the Direct method.

The positive outcome of working with this method is that students will improve their memory and they will learn super fast however, since they are only learning certain words and vocabulary they might not be able to learn and develop the language as a whole and also, classes might be boring due to repeating the same things over and over again.

The techniques the army method works with are also called drills and they are the following:

1. Repetition drill: The students repeat after the teacher any sentence, word or it can also be a dialogue, the teacher models the conversation and they might thinks of many other ways for the students to read and repeat a conversation.

2. Substitution drill: Substitute a word in a sentence by looking for synonyms and learning new vocabulary.

3. Questions and answers drill: Practice questions and asnwers with classmates and answer the teachers' questions.

4. Transformation drill: Practicing gramatical structure and changing sentences from affirmative to negative and to questions.

And that is it for the Audiolingual method or also called Army method, I hope I was able to summarize all the important information about this method in this entry, thank you for reading and stay tuned for the next one, bye bye!👋