The audio lingual teaching method is a method for teaching adults foreign languages. It uses the same principles as language immersion, which means that students do not use their native language when learning the foreign language. Although the purest form of this method of teaching has been heavily criticized, it is still used today. It has also been modified by programs such as the Rosetta Stone
. to teach people languages.The major premise of audio lingual teaching is that by using positive reinforcement, people can learn a new language. Although this is how children learn to speak, it is not necessarily the most effective method of teaching adults to speak. The instructor uses positive reinforcement when a person uses correct grammar when speaking. This particular method of teaching is different from the "direct method" because it provided reinforcement not when students used correct vocabulary, but rather when they used correct grammar.In audio lingual teaching, there are several forms of repetition that occur. In one form, the student simply repeats the sentence he hears it. One example is "I pick up the book," and the student would repeat "I pick up the book." In another type of drill, the student replaces the one word in the sentence with another word. For example, the teacher says "I pick up the book... spoon." The student would then say "I pick up the spoon." Inflection requires that the student repeat a word in another grammatical form when he repeats the sentence. For example the teacher would say "I read the book," and the student would repeat "I read the books," thus pluralizing the word book. The last type of drill is where the student restates the sentence. Therefore, the teacher may say "Tell me to stop reading so much" and the student would repeat "don't read so much."In modern times, this method is used in conjunction with other methods to teach students a foreign language. More reference links: http://www.tjtaylor.net/english/teaching-method-audio-lingual http://www2.uni-wuppertal.de/FB4/anglistik/multhaup/Lehrveranstaltungen/introduction_to_elt/history_of_approaches_3.htm
