In teaching, Robert Lado states that audio-lingual method is “a method that considers listening and speaking the first and central task in learning a language, and
reading and writing as skills follow speaking and listening.
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From the statement above, it means that this method emphasizes listening and speaking in teaching learning process, reading and writing as skills that follow
speaking and listening. So, the writer assumes that audio-lingual method is an approach which
emphasizes on drilling, memorization and practice in teaching learning process.
f. Principle of Audio-lingual Method
The principle of the Audio-lingual Method may be summed up in the following list adapted from Prator and Celce-Murcia 1979:
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1 The teacher greets to the students. 2 New material is presented in dialogue form.
3 There is dependence on mimicry, memorization of set phrases. And over- learning.
4 Structures are sequenced by means of contrastive analysis and taught one at a time.
5 Structural pattern are taught using repetitive drills. 6 There is little or no grammatical explanation; grammar is taught by
inductive analogy rather than deductive explanation. 7 Vocabulary is strictly limited and learned in context.
8 There is much use of tapes, language labs, and visual aids. 9 Great importance is attached to pronunciation.
10 Very little use of the mother tongue by teachers is permitted. 11 Successful responses are immediately reinforced.
12 There is a great effort to get students to produce error-free utterances. 13 There is a tendency to manipulate language and disregard content.
For a number of reasons the Audio-lingual Method ALM enjoyed many years of popularity, and even to this day, adaptations of the ALM are found in
contemporary methodologies. The ALM was firmly rooted in respectable theoretical perspectives at the time. Materials were carefully prepared, tested, and disseminated,
to educational institution. “Success” could be more overtly experienced by students as they practiced their dialogs in off-hours.
24
David Nunan, Language Teaching Methodology; a textbook for teachers, London: Longman, 1991, p.231.
25
Robert Lado, Language Approach; A Scientific Approach, New York: Mc. Graw Hill inc, 1976, p. 180.
26
H. Douglas Brown, Principles of Language Learning and Teaching fourth edition, San Francisco State University: Longman, 2000, p. 74-75.
But the popularity did not last forever. Due in part to Wilga Rivers’s 1964
eloquent exposure of the shortcomings of the ALM, and its ultimate failure to teach long-term communicative proficiency, its popularity waned. We discovered that
language was not really acquired through a process of habit formation and over- learning. Those errors were not necessarily to be avoided at all costs, and that
structural linguistics did not tell us everything about language that we needed to know. While the ALM was a valiant attempt to reap the fruits of language teaching
methodologies that had preceded it, in the end it still fell short, as all methods do. But we learned something from the very failure of the ALM to do everything it had
promised, and we moved forward.
g. Design of Audio-lingual Method
