The typical approach in the classroom was to begin with a "prereading" period during which the books were withheld from the students. It was felt that seeing the written word interfered with the development of proper habits of pronunciation. The length of the recommended prereading period varied from a few days or weeks to an entire semester, or perhaps even a year or more in the elementary and junior high schools. The language being taught also influenced the length of time that teachers felt was necessary for an adequate initiation of proper habits of pronunciation. Obviously, there is less interference from the written word in a more phonetic language like Spanish than in a language like French. The tendency recently seems to be to shorten the prereading period considerably, or to eliminate it entirely.
After the students received their books, the class maintained a natural sequence of language skills. At any given time the teacher might be covering oral work in one chapter and assigning reading and writing material from preceding chapters. The class progressed through the book by memorizing the dialogs, practicing the pattern drills until the students could give automatic responses to the stimuli, and then, using the learned vocabulary and structure, talking about some topic in a carefully controlled context.
Within the units themselves, the teacher might choose to proceed by studying each unit separately. In this fashion, she had the students memorize the dialog, do the drills, and then practice. Another possibility was to partition the book horizontally rather than vertically. In this procedure, the students learned the first few lines of the dialog, drilled the structures in these specific lines, and then applied these learned structures and vocabulary to a communicative situation. The students progressed in a similar fashion through all the lines of the dialog. Using this organization of the materials, there were a few days in which the students were beginning the next unit while finishing the preceding one. Thus, the units as well as their content were integrated into a continuous sequence.