Aula 05

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Linguística Aplicada ao Ensino de Língua Inglesa
Paula Bullio
Aula 5
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The audio-lingual method
The entry of the USA into World War II had a significant effect on language teaching In America. To supply the U.S. government with personnel who were fluent in German, French, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Malay, and other languages, and who could work as interpreters, code-room assistants, and translators, it was necessary to set up a special language training program. The government commissioned American Universities to develop foreign language programs for military personnel. Thus the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) was established m 1942. Fifty-five American universities were involved in the program by the beginning of 1943. 
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The objective of the army programs was for students to attain conversational proficiency in a variety of foreign languages. Since this was not the goal of conventional foreign language courses in the United States, new approaches were necessary. Linguists, such as Bloomfield at Yale, had already developed training programs as part of their linguistic research that were designed to give linguistics and anthropologists mastery of American Indian languages and other languages they were studying. Textbooks did not exist for such languages.
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The Army Specialized Training Program lasted only about two years but attracted considerable attention in the popular press and in the academic community. For the next ten years the "Army Method" and its suitability for use in regular language programs was discussed. The "methodology" of the Army Method, like the Direct Method, derived from the intensity of contact with the target language rather than from any well-developed methodological basis. 
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America had now emerged as a major international power. There was a growing demand for foreign expertise in the teaching of English. Thousands of foreign students entered the United States to study in universities, and many of these students required training in English before they could begin their studies. These factors led to the emergence of the American approach to ESL, which by the mid-fifties had become Audiolingualism.
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The theory of language underlying Audiolingualism was derived from a view proposed by American linguists in the 1950s - a view that came to be known as structural linguistics. Structural linguistics had developed in part as a reaction to traditional grammar. Traditional approaches to the study of language had linked the study of language to philosophy and to a mentalist approach to grammar. Grammar was considered a branch of logic, and the grammatical categories of Indo-European languages were thought to represent ideal categories in languages. 
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Language was viewed as a system of structurally related elements for the encoding of meaning, the elements being phonemes, morphemes, words, structures, and sentence types. The term structural referred to these characteristics: 
(a) Elements in a language were thought of as being linearly produced in a rule-governed (structured) way. 
(b) Language samples could be exhaustively described at any structural level of description (phonetic, phonemic, morphological, etc.). 
(c) Linguistic levels were thought of as systems within systems - that is, as being pyramidally structured; phonemic systems led to morphemic systems, and these in turn led to the higher-level systems of phrases, clauses, and sentences. 
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Vídeo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pz0TPDUz3FU&hd=1
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The phonological and grammatical systems of the language constitute the organization of language and by implication the units of production and comprehension. The grammatical system consists of a listing of grammatical elements and rules for their linear combination into words, phrases, and sentences. Rule-ordered processes involve addition, deletion, and transposition of elements. An important tenet of structural linguistics was that the primary medium of language is oral: Speech is language. Since many languages do not have a written form and we learn to speak before we learn to read or write, it was argued that language is "primarily what is spoken and only secondarily what is written" 
 (Brooks 1964). 
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Therefore, it was assumed that speech had a priority in language teaching. This was contrary to popular views of the relationship of the spoken and written forms of language, since it had been widely assumed that language existed principally as symbols written on paper, and that spoken language was an imperfect realization of the pure written version. 
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The language teaching theoreticians and methodologists who developed Audiolingualism not only had a convincing and powerful theory of language to draw upon but they were also working in a period when a prominent school of American psychology - known as behavioral psychology - claimed to have tapped the secrets of all human learning, including language learning. Behaviorism, like structural linguistics, is another antimentalist, empirically based approach to the study of human behavior. 
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To the behaviorist, the human being is an organism capable of a wide repertoire of behaviors. The occurrence of these behaviors is dependent upon three crucial elements in learning: a stimulus, which serves to elicit behavior; a response triggered by a stimulus; and reinforcement, which serves to mark the response as being appropriate (or inappropriate) and encourages the repetition (or suppression) of the response in the future. 
http://epltt.coe.uga.edu
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To apply this theory to language learning is to identify the organism as the foreign language learner, the behavior as verbal behavior, the stimulus as what is taught or presented of the foreign language, the response as the learner's reaction to the stimulus and the reinforcement as the extrinsic approval and praise of the teacher or fellow students or the intrinsic self-satisfaction of target language use. Language mastery is represented as acquiring a set of appropriate language stimulus-response chains.
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Foreign language learning is basically a process of mechanical habit formation. Good habits are formed by giving correct responses rather than by making mistakes. By memorizing dialogues and performing pattern drills the chances of producing mistakes are minimized. Language is verbal behavior - that is, the automatic production and comprehension of utterances - and can be learned by inducing the students to do likewise.
Language skills are learned more effectively if the items to be learned in the target language are presented in spoken form before they have seen in written form. Aural oral training is needed to provide the foundation for the development of other language skills.
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Analogy provides a better foundation for language learning than analysis. Analogy involves the processes of generalization and discrimination. Explanations of rules are therefore not given until students have practiced a pattern in a variety of contexts and arc thought to have acquired a perception of the analogies involved. Drills can enable learners to form correct analogies. Hence the approach to the teaching of grammar is essentially inductive rather than deductive.
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The meanings that the words of a language have for the native speaker can be learned only in a linguistic and cultural context and not in isolation. Teaching a language thus involves teaching aspects of the cultural system of the people who speak the language(Rivers 1964: 19-22). 
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The prominent Harvard behaviorist B. F. Skinner had elaborated a theory of learning applicable to language learning in his influential book Verbal Behavior (1957), in which he stated, "We have no reason to assume that verbal behavior differs in any fundamental respect from non-verbal behavior, or that any new principles must be invoked to account for it”. Armed with a powerful theory of the nature of language and of language learning, audiolingualists could now turn to the design of language teaching courses and materials.
http://webspace.ship.edu
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As it was said before, the Audio-Lingual Method was developed in the USA during World War II. At that time there was a need for people to learn foreign language. While communication in the target language was the goal of the Direct Method, there were at the time exciting new ideas about language and learning emanating from the disciplines of descriptive linguistics and behavioral psychology. These ideas led to the development of the Audio-Lingual Method. Some of the principles are similar to those of the Direct Method, but many are different, having been based upon conceptions of language and learning from these two disciplines.
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What are the goals of teachers who use the Audio-Lingual Method?
Teachers want their students to be able to use the target language communicatively. In order to do this, they believe students need to overlearn the target language, to learn to use it automatically without stopping to think. Their students achieve this by forming new habits in the target language and overcoming the old habits of their native language.
http://swedishmadeeasy.com
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What is the role of the teacher? What is the role of the students?
The teacher is like an orchestra leader, directing and controlling the language behaviour of her students. She also is responsible for providing her students with a good model for imitation.
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Students are imitators of the teacher’s model or the listening she supplies of model speakers. They follow the teacher’s directions and respond as accurately and as rapid as possible.
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What are some characteristics of the teaching/ learning process?
New vocabulary and structures are presented through dialogs. The dialogs are learned through imitation and repetition. 
Drills are conducted based upon the patterns present in the dialog. Students’ successful responses are positively reinforced. Grammar is induced from the examples given; explicit grammar rules are not provided. Cultural information is contextualized in the dialogs or presented by the teacher. Students’ reading and written work is based upon the oral work they did earlier.
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What is the nature of student-teacher interaction? What is the nature of student-student interaction?
There is student-student interaction in chain drills or when students take different roles in dialogs, but this interaction is teacher-directed. Most of the interaction is between teacher and students and students and is initiated by the teacher.
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How is language viewed? How is culture viewed?
The view of language in the Audio-Lingual Method has been influenced by descriptive linguistics. Every language is seen as having its own unique system. The system is comprised of several different levels: phonological, morphological, and syntactic. Each level has its own distinctive patterns.
http://mind42.com
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Everyday speech is emphasized in the Audio-Lingual Method. The level of complexity of the speech is graded, however, so that beginning students are presented with only simple forms.
Culture consists of the everyday behavior and lifestyle and lifestyle of the target language speakers. 
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What areas of language are emphasized? What language skills are emphasized?
The structures of the language are emphasized over all the other areas. The syllabus is typically a structural one, with the structures for any particular unit included in the new dialog. Vocabulary is also contextualizes within the dialog. It is, however, limited since the emphasis is placed on the acquisition of the patterns of the language.
The natural order of skills presentation is adhered to: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The oral/aural skills receive most of the attention. Pronunciation is taught from the beginning, often by students working in language laboratories on discriminating between members of minimal pairs.
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What is the role of students’ native language?
The habits of the students’ native language are thought to interfere with the students’ attempts to master the target language. Therefore, the target language is used in the classroom, not the students’ native language. A contrastive analysis between the students’ native language and the target language will reveal where a teacher should expect the most interference.
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How is evaluation accomplished?
It is a discrete-point in nature, that is, each question on the test would focus on only one point of the language at a time. Students might be asked to distinguish between words in a minimal pair, for example, or to supply an appropriate verb form in a sentence.
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How does the teacher respond to student errors?
Student errors are to be avoided if at all possible through the teacher’s awareness of where the students will have difficulty and restriction of what they are taught to say.
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Bloomfield, L. 1933. Language. New York: Holt. Brooks, N. 1964. Language and Language Learning: Theory and Practice. 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Bruner, J. 1966. On knowing: Essays for the Left Hand. New York : Atheneum. Carroll , J . B. 1953. The Study of Language: A Survey of Linguistics and Related Disciplines in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
_______. 1966a. Research in Foreign Language Teaching: The Last Five Years. In R. C. Mead, Jr. (ed.), Language Teaching: Broader Contexts, pp. 12-42. Northeast Conference Reports on the Teaching of Foreign Languages: Reports of the Working Committees. New York: MLA Materials Center.
_______. 1966b. The contributions of psychological theory and educational research to the teaching Chomsky, N. 1959. A review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Language. 35(1): 26-58.
_________. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
_________. 1966. Linguistic th~ory. Reprinted in: P. B. Allen and P. Van Buren (eds.) , Chomsky: Selected Readings, pp. 152-9. London: Oxford University Press.
Gattegno, C. 1972. Teaching Foreign Languages in Schools: The Silent Way. 2nd ed. New York: Educational Solutions.
_________. 1976. The Common Sense of Teaching Foreign Languages. New York: Educational Solutions.
Hower, C. H., and D. Winzenz. 1970. Comparison of associative learning strategies. Psycho1Jomic Sciences 20: 119-20.
Moulton, W. 1966. A Linguistic Guide to Language Learning. New York: Modern Language Association.
__________. 1961. Linguistics and language teaching in the United States: 1940-1960. In C. Mohrmann, A. Sommerfelt, and J. Whatrnough (eds.), Trends in European and American Linguistics, 1930-1960, pp. 82-109. Utrecht: Spectrum.
___________. 1963. What is structural drill? International Journal of American Linguistics 29 (2, pt. 3): 3-15.
Rivers, W. M. 1981. Teaching Foreign Language Skills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Selman, M. 1977. The silentway: insights for ESL. TESL Talk (8): 33- 6.
Skinner, B. F. 1957. Verbal Behavior. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Stevick, E. W. 1976. Memory, Meaning and Method: Some Psychological Perspectives on Language Learning. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House.
References
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Linguística Aplicada ao Ensino de Língua Inglesa
Paula Bullio
Atividade 5
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Which of the following techniques follows from the principles of the Audio-Lingual Method, and which ones don’t? Explain the reasons for your answer.
The teacher asks beginning students to write a composition about the system of transportation in their home countries. If they need a vocabulary word that they don’t know, they are told to look in a bilingual dictionary for a translation.
Toward the end of the third week of the course, the teacher gives EFL students a reading passage. The teacher asks the students to read the passage and to answer certain questions based upon it. The passage contains words and structures introduced during the first weeks of the course.
Some people believe that knowledge of a first and second language can be helpful to learners who are trying to learn a third language. What would an Audio-Lingual teacher say about this? Why?
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No. In the audio-lingual method, the native language is not used and new vocabulary is taught through lines of a dialog.
Yes. In the Audio-Lingual Method, the sentence patterns and grammar points are included within
 the dialog or short texts.
This teacher would not agree because they believe that the use of students’ native language will interfere in their learning process.
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