![]() Students would sit in cubicles, listening and repeating, often recording their voices and listening to the playback.įor anyone born after 1980, this kind of approach to language learning may sound like a bygone era. Language labs were a big part of the methodology. In ALM, only the target language is spoken by the teacher, and students are expected to learn the patterns through mechanical repetition. There is no “cognitive” aspect, where the teacher explains complex topics (something the Babbel Method uses). Language teaching specialists drew on Fries’ structural linguistics and combined it with the principles of behavioral psychology, and voilà! The Audio-Lingual Method was born.Īlthough the method is absolutely grammar-focussed, it never explains or contextualizes the grammar. government decided its citizens had to learn more languages, and threw money at the problem with the National Defense Education Act. Many soldiers were trained intensively in a short space of time, with a high success rate.Īfter the war, stung into action by fear of being left out of international scientific advances – particularly when the Russians launched a space satellite - the U.S. ![]() They require drill, drill and more drill, and only enough vocabulary to make such drills possible,” he said. “It is these basic patterns that constitute the learner’s task. Charles Fries, a structural linguist and director of the first English Language Institute, had developed a method that used intensive drilling of basic sentence patterns. The army needed huge numbers of servicemen as interpreters, code-room assistants and translators. World War II was a key factor in ALM’s rise to prominence. If this sounds a bit like the call-and-reply of a drill sergeant barking at a platoon of soldiers, it’s because that’s exactly what it was. This would be followed by drills designed to reinforce the new structure, either with direct repetition, substitution or restatement. A typical lesson would often start with a sample dialogue that had to be memorized and recited. What did this mean in practice? Drills, drills, and more drills. When a child says “up” and she is picked up, they will remember the experience and her understanding of the word will be deeper, so they will be more likely to use it correctly in the future. Skinner’s behaviorist theory that humans could be trained with a system of reinforcement. It was a world of chalk and blackboards and grammar drills, and it was dominated for many years by a method appositely called the “Army method” - more officially termed the Audio-Lingual Method, or ALM.ĪLM was heavily influenced by Harvard psychologist B.F. Language learning (or language acquisition as we are now supposed to call it) was a very different kettle of fish in the decades after World War II. So why does she remember this phrase so clearly? She has been known to spend time searching for her glasses only to discover them in the fridge. My grandmother, wonderful woman that she is, is not renowned for her memory. She was not alone in learning this phrase – la plume de ma tante was a byword in ridiculous second language education, to the extent that in 1958 LIFE Magazine called it “the most idiotically useless phrase in a beginner’s French textbook.” For those who never had the pleasure or pain of learning French, it translates to “My aunt’s pen is in the garden with the lion.” Difficult to slip into casual conversation, to say the least. For years she studied it dutifully, and the one phrase that she recalls vividly to this day is: La plume de ma tante est dans le jardin avec le lion. ![]() My grandmother learned French at school in Australia in the late 1950s.
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