Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

four skills: language teaching can be divided into the four skills of listening,
speaking, reading and writing; in the audio-lingual style, additionally, listening
and reading are considered ‘passive’ skills, speaking and writing ‘active’ ones
Keywords
The name ‘audio-lingual’ is attached to a teaching style that reached its peak in
the 1960s, best conveyed in Robert Lado’s thoughtful book Language Teaching: A
Scientific Approach (Lado, 1964). Its emphasis is on teaching the spoken language
through dialogues and drills. A typical lesson in an audio-lingual style starts with
a dialogue, say about buying food in a shop:
A: Good morning.
B: Good morning.
A: Could I have some milk please?
B: Certainly. How much?
The language in the dialogue is controlled so that it introduces only a few new
vocabulary items, ‘milk’, ‘cola’, ‘mineral water’, for instance, and includes several
examples of each new structural point: ‘Could I have some cola?’, ‘Could I have
some mineral water?’ and so on. The students listen to the dialogue as a whole,

---

either played back from a tape or read by the teacher; they repeat it sentence by
sentence, and they act it out: ‘Now get into pairs of shopkeeper and customer and
try to buy the following items …’
Then the students have a structure drill in which they practise grammatical
points connected with the dialogue, such as the polite questions used in requests:
‘Could I …?’ This is handled by an adjacency pair of turns, to use terms from
Chapter 9. Mostly these are called stimulus and response, taken from behaviourist
theory, but I have tended to use the more neutral input and output to fit in with
processing theory (Cook, 1968). So the teacher presents a specimen from a tape, or
written up on a whiteboard in less strict audio-lingual classes:
Input: Could I have some (milk, water, cola)?
Output: Milk.
The students now answer by constructing appropriate outputs from each input:
Output: Could I have some milk?
Input: Water.
Output: Could I have some water?
… and so on. The drill repeatedly practises the structure with variation of vocabu-
lary; the students hear an input and have to manipulate it in various ways to get
an output, here by fitting a vocabulary item into a slot in the structural pattern.
Drills developed historically into semi-realistic exchanges, by linking the input
and output in conversational adjacency pairs:
Input: What about milk?
Output: Oh yes, could I have some milk?
Input: And cola?
Output: Oh yes, could I have some cola?
Input: And you might need some mineral water.
Output: Oh yes, could I have some mineral water?
Essentially the same technique occurs still in New Headway (Soars and Soars, 2002)
as a repetition exercise, ‘Listen Check and Repeat’:
I got up early.
Are you getting up early tomorrow?
I went swimming.
Are you going to swim tomorrow?
Finally, there are exploitation activities to make the students incorporate the
language in their own use: ‘Think what you want to buy today and ask your
neighbour if you can have some.’ As Wilga Rivers (1964) puts it, ‘Some provision
will be made for the student to apply what he has learnt in a structured commu-
nication situation.’ In Realistic English (Abbs et al., 1968), we followed up the main
audio-lingual dialogue with ‘Things to do’. For instance, after practising a dia-
logue about a traffic accident, the students had to make notes about the witnesses,
to imagine what the policeman would say to his wife when he gets home, and to
work with a partner to devise advice to give a 5-year-old on how to cross the road.
Similarly, a drill about ‘infinitive with negative’, practising ‘And the woman /man/
car not to meet/ see /buy …?’ leads into an activity: ‘Now offer each other advice
about the people you should see and the cars you should buy.’
The audio-lingual style 243

---

Chapter 1 mentioned the language teaching assumption that speech should
take precedence over writing. The audio-lingual style interprets this in two ways.
One is short-term: anything the students learn must be heard before being seen,
so the teacher always has to say a new word aloud before writing it on the black-
board. The other is long-term: the students must spend a period using only spo-
ken skills before they are introduced to the written skills; this might last a few
weeks or indeed a whole year. This long-term interpretation in my experience led
to most problems. Adult students who were used to the written text as a crutch did
not know why it was taken from them; I used to present dialogues only from tape
until I caught the students writing down the text under their desks; so I decided
that, if they were going to have a written text anyway, my correctly spelt version
was preferable to their amateur version.
Audio-lingual teaching divided language into the four skills of listening, speak-
ing, reading and writing, and grouped these into active skills which people use to
produce language, such as speaking and writing, and passive skills through which
they receive it, such as listening and reading. As well as speech coming before writ-
ing, passive skills should come before active skills, which leads to the ideal
sequence of the four skills given in Figure 13.1: (1) listening, (2) speaking, (3) read-
ing, (4) writing. So students should listen before they speak, speak before they read,
read before they write. Needless to say, no one now accepts that listening and
reading are exactly ‘passive’, as Chapter 7 demonstrates.
Second language learning and language teaching styles