Activity 7

Audiolingualism was developed in the USA in the 1940s and 1950s, and was related generally in its principles to behaviourist psychology. The ALM textbook is typically organized into lists of structures, and these are numerous drills and repetition exercises. Learners are constantly asked to repeat model sentences, and then to manipulate these sentences by changing them to other tenses, or by substituting some of the words, as in the following examples:

(From: Intensive Course in English, Part I, 1963)

The general belief for proponents of ALM is that learners will be conditioned unconsciously into absorbing the rules through constant repetition of sentence patterns. This then is an example of an inductive FOFS approach. One coursebook states that 'Grammar is presented inductively in this course. Technical terms and explanations are avoided' (Intensive Course in English, Part I: vi). For proponents of this approach, teachers are 'being asked to teach a set of habits, not a set of rules for sentence formation […] the rule of grammar is [only] a summary of behaviour' (Diller, 1971: 15).

A typical audiolingual drill is shown below (recorded in a Brazilian language school in 1992). For Diller, '[t]hese drills involve nothing more than the manipulation of structures. There is no pretence that they do anything else; they are not intended to resemble real communication' (Diller, 1971: 45). The extract has been edited in the interest of brevity. In the original, the teacher often asked the students to repeat each sentence three or four times. The whole exercise was repeated a number of times using different model sentences (eg 'I work here' and 'I live here'). It is also worth noting that two or three of the fifteen students were unable to keep up with the rest of the class during the drill.