The Audio Lingual VS Silent Way Method

As we enter the classroom, the first thing we notice is that the students are attentively listening as the teacher is presenting a new dialog, a conversation between two people. The students know they will be expected to eventually memorize the dialog the teacher is introducing. All of the teacher’s instructions are in English. Sometimes she uses actions to convey meaning, but not one word of the students’ native language is uttered. Then the teacher says: ok class listen carefully.
Two people are walking along a sidewalk in town are named Sally and Bill. Listen to their conversation:
Sally: Good morning, Bill.
Bill : Good morning.
Sally: How are you?
Bill : Fine, thanks, And you?
Sally: Fine. Where are you going?
Bill : I’m going to the post office.
Sally: I am too. Shall we go together?
Bill : Sure. Let’s go.
Listen one more time. This time try to understand all that I am saying,’ Now she has the whole class repeat each of the lines of the dialog after her model. They repeat each line several times before moving on to the next line. When the class comes to the lines, I’m going to the ppost office,’ they stumble a bit in their repetition. The teacher, at this point,, stops the repetition and uses a backward build-up drill (expansion drill). The purpose of this drill is to break down the troublesome sentence into smaller parts. The teacher starts with the end of the sentence and has the class repeat just the last two words, and the class repeats this expanded phrase. Little by little the teacher builds up the phrases until the entire sentence is being repeated.
TEACHER: Repeat after me: Post office
CLASS : Post Office
TEACHER: To the post office
CLASS : To the post office
TEACHER: Going to the post office
CLASS : Going to the post office
TEACHER: I’m going to the post office
CLASS : I’m going to the post office

Through this step-by-step procedure, the teacher is able to give the students help in producing the troublesome line. Having worked on the line in small pieces, the students are also able to take note of where each word or phrase begins and ends in the sentence.
In effect; the class is experiencing a repetition drill where the task is to listen carefully and attempt to mimic the teacher’s model as accurately as possible. Next the class and the teacher switch roles in order to practice a little more, the teacher saying Bill’s lines and the class saying Sally’s. Then the teacher divides the class in half so that each half gets to try to say on their own either Bill’s or Sally’s lines. To further practice the lines of this dialog, the teacher has all the boys in the class take Bill’s part and all the girl take Sally’s.
She then initiates a chain d ill with four of the lines from dialog. A chain drill gives students an opportunity to say the lines individually. The teacher listens and can tell which students are struggling and will need more practice. A chain drill also lets students use the expressions in communication with someone else, eventhough the communication is very limited. The teacher addresses the student nearest her with, Good morning ,Jose.’ He, in turn, responds,’ Good morning, teacher.’ She says. ‘How are you?’ ‘Jose answers, ‘Fine, thanks. And you?’ The teacher replies, ‘Fine.’ He understands through the teacher’s gestures that he is to turn, says her lines in reply to him. When she has finished, she greets the student on the other side of her. This chain continues until all of the students have a chance to ask and answer the question. Then the teacher moves next to the second major phase of the lesson. She continues to drill the students with language from the dialog, but these drill require more than simple repetition.
The first drill the teacher leads is a single-slot substitution drill in which the student will repeat a sentence from the dialog and replace a word or phrase in the sentence with the word or phrase the teacher gives them. This word or phrase is called the clue. The teacher begins by reciting a line from the dialog, ‘I am going to the post office,’ Following this she shows the students a picture of a bank and says the phrase, ‘The bank. ‘She pauses, then says, ‘I’am going to the bank. ‘From her example the students realize that they are supposed to take the cue phrase, (‘the bank.‘), which the teacher supplies, and put it into its proper place in the sentence. Now she gives them their first cue phrase, ‘The drugstore. ‘Together the students respond, ‘I am going to the drugstore. The students chorus, ‘I am going to the park,’ Other cues she offers in turn are ‘the cafe,’ ‘The supermarket,’ ‘the bus station,’ ‘the football field,’ ‘and ‘the library.’ Each cue is accompanied by a picture as before. After the students have gone through the drill sequence three times, the teacher no longer provides a spoken cue phrase instead she simply shows the pictures one at a tim, and the students repeat the entire sentence, putting the name of the place in the picture in the appropriate slot in the sentence. This substitution drill is slightly more difficult for the student since they have to change the form of the verb ‘be’ , ‘to’ ,’is’, ‘or’, ‘are’, depending on which subject pronoun the teacher gives them.
Instead, after going through the drill a few times suplying oral cues, the teacher points to a boy in the class and the students understand they are to use the pronoun’he’ in the sentence. Finally, the teacher increases the complexity of the task by leading the students in a multiple-slot substitution drill. This is essentially the same type of drill as the single-slot the teacher just used. However with this drill, students must recognize what part of speech the cue word is and where it fits into the sentence. The student must make a decision concerning where the cue word or phrase belongs in the sentence also supplied by the teacher. The teacher in this class starts off by having the students repeat the original the dialog. ‘I am going to the post office’. Then she gives them the cue’she.’ The students understand and produce, ‘She is going to the post office,’ the next cue the teacher offers is ‘to the park.’ The student hesitate at first; then they respond by correctly producing, ‘She is going to the park.’ She continues in this manner, sometimes providing a subject pronoun, other times naming a location.
The substitution drills are followed by a transformation drill. This type of drill asks students to change one type of sentence into another-an affirmative sentence into a negative or an active sentence into a passive., for example, ‘I say, “She is going to the post office.” You make a question by saying, “Is she going to the post office?”
The teacher models two more examples of this transformation, then asks, ‘Does everyone understand? OK, lets begin. “They are going to the bank.” “The class replies in turn, ‘Are they going to the bank?’ They transform approximately fifteen of these patterns, and then the teacher decides they are ready to move on to a question-and-answer drill. The teacher holds up one of the pictures she used earlier, the picture of a football field, and asks the class. ‘Are you going to the football field?’ she answer, ‘ Yes, I’m going to the football field.,’ She poses the next question while holding up a picture of a park, ‘Are you going to the park?’ And again answer herself, ‘Yes, I’m going to the park.’ She holds up a third picture, the one of a library?’ She poses a question to the class, ‘Are you going to library?’ They respond together, going to the library.’
‘Very Good,’ the teacher says. Through her action and examples, the students have learned that they are to answer the questions following the patterns she has modeled. The teacher drill them with this pattern for the next few minutes. Since the students can handle it, she poses the question to selected individuals rapidly, one after another. The students are expected to respond very quikly, without pausing. She works a little longer on this question-and-answer drill, sometimes providing her students with situations that require a negative answer and sometimes encouragement to each student. She holds up pictures and poses question one right after another,but the students seem to have no trouble keeping up with her. The only time she changes the rhythm is when a student seriously mispronounces a word. When this occurs she restates the word and work briefly with student until his pronunciation is closer to her own.
REVIEWING THE TECHNIQUES
IF you agree with the above answer, you may wish to implement the following techniques; of course, if you do not agree, there may be techniques describe below that you are already using or can adapt to your approach.
DIALOG MEMORIZATION
Dialogs or short conversation between two people are often used to begin a new lesson. Students memorize th dialog through mimicry; student usually take the role of one person in the dialog, and the teacher the other. Another way of practicing the two roles is for half of the class to take one role and the other half to take the other. In the Audio-Lingual Method, certain sentence patterns and grammar points are included within the dialog. These patterns and points are later practiced in drills based on the lines of the dialog.
BACKWARD BUILD-UP (EXPANSION) DRILL
This drill is used when a long line of a dialog is giving students trouble. The teacher speaks down the line into several parts. Then, following the teacher’s cue, the students expand what they are repeating part by part until they are able to repeat the entire lines. The teacher begins with the part at the end of the sentence (works backward from there) to keep the into keep the intonation of the line as natural as possible.
REPETITION DRILL
Students are asked to repeat the teacher’s model as accurately and as quickly as possible. This drill is often used to teach the lines of the dialog.
CHAIN DRILL
A chain driil gets its name from the chain of conversation that forms around the room as students, one-by-one, ask and answer question of each other. The teacher begins the chain by gretting a particultural student or asking him a question. A chain drill allows some controlled communication, eventhough it is limited. A chain drill also gives the teacher an oppoturnities to check each student’s sprech.
SINGLE-SLOT SUBSTITUTION DRILL
The teacher says a line, usually from the dialog then she says a word or a phrase-caalled cue. The major purpose of this drill is to give the students practice in finding and filling in the slots of a sentence.
MULTIPLE-SLOT SUBSTITUTION DRILL
This drill is similiar to the single-slot substitution drill. The difference is that the teacher gives cue phrase, one at time, that fit into different slots in the dialog line.
TRANFORMATION DRILL
The teacher gives students a certain kind of sentence pattern, an affirmative sentence for example. Other example of transformation to ask of student are changing a statement into a question, an active sentence into a passive one, or direct speech into reported speech.
QUESTION-and-ANSWER DRILL
This drill gives student practice with answering questions. The students should answer the teacher’s questions very quickly. This gives students practice with the question patterns.
USE OF MINIMAL PAIRS
The teacher pairs of words which differ in only one sound. For example: ‘ship/sheep’. Student ask to they teacher read it and difference two words. The teacher selects the sounds to work on after she has done a contrastive analysis, a comparison between the students’ native language an dthe language they are studying.
COMPLETE THE DIALOG
Selected words are erased from a dialog students have learned. Students complete the dialog by filling the blanks with the missing words.
GRAMMAR GAME
Games like the supermarket alphabet game described in this chapter are used in the Audio Lingual Method. The games are designed to get students to practice a grammar point within a context and it is rather limited in this game.