I am glad that you are back! In today’s entry we are going to talk about The Audiolingual Method.

This method was born due to the necessity of communication during WWII since soldiers needed to understand and speak the languages of their allies as clearly and quickly as possible. With the help of this method the students are able to improve their pronunciation, their listening skills, and also learning grammar structures, but the method itself emphasizes on listening and speaking before writing and reading (of the target language).

Here is a picture of teacher Orlando explaining to us The Audiolingual Method:

This method uses the language as form of behavior to be learned through the formation of correct speech habits, which basically means that it tries to develop habits of the SL in the TL. The dialogues and the patter drills used in this method are performed in order to form habits in the students, so it would be easier for them when they face different scenarios.

Now I am going to explain to you some of the strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats of this method.

One strength is that students are encouraged to use foreign languages and speak in every day environments. One weakness is that this method is teacher-dominated since the teacher is the one who is sharing the knowledge, students just have to do what he requests them. One opportunity that we have is making the class more dynamic and less boring with activities in which all the students can participate. A threat of this method is that students learn all the structures just because they have to, not because they understand them.

In our class we made a chain drill and the script was like this: “Me llamo _your name_ y todos los días me lavo la _Name of a fruit_”. It was very funny and it encouraged us to use our memory because we had to remember the name of the fruit that every classmate chose; obviously, this was a demonstration, in a real class instead of using name of fruits we could use grammar. For example, I am doing my social service teaching English to high school students and they were having a hard time with the prepositions, so I decided to make a chain drill with them and the script was like this: “Me llamo _Your name_ and I use _In for places/On for dates/At for time”; they had to choose one preposition and use it in their participation and remember the one of their classmates. It was a very helpful and now they do not have a hard time with prepositions.

This was my summary of The Audiolingual Method, if I am missing something, please let me know, I’ll be waiting for your feedback.

See you in my next entry!