3 Fresh Ways to Use the Audio-lingual Method in Your Class

1. Focus on Practical Pronunciation

The audio-lingual approach, based upon language structure, naturally treated the sounds of language as important building blocks for the creation of utterances, that is, meaningful strings of sounds.

All spoken languages are pronounced. Individual sounds can be isolated. In any language, there may be from 20 to hundreds of sounds. No matter how many sounds the language you teach employs, you will need to first have a basic understanding of what they are, how they are produced and how they work together to create utterances. Let’s look at how to gain that understanding and apply it to teaching.

2. Do Structural Drilling Exercises

As in many disciplines, the repetitive practice of basic constructs develops strength and agility for later improvisational work. In the audio-lingual method, this manifested itself in sentence structure drilling.

The use of the word “drill” is kind of an unfortunate leftover from the “Army Method” that gave way to the audio-lingual method. Using that word can make students tremble with fear or yawn with boredom. So though “drilling” is useful and valid, you might want to simply call the activity something like “sentence practice,” or even “extended pronunciation practice,” which in the end, it actually is.

3. Use Dialogue Practice

The natural next step in the construction of language, from sound through sentence, is dialogue, the exchange of information between two or more people. Structural linguists found that many conversational exchanges followed basic structures that can be studied and learned.