Early audio-lingual classes were prime examples of teacher-centered classes. The teacher, or the tape, served as the language model. The students listened to the model before repeating sounds, words, phrases, dialog lines, or no-change pattern drills after the model. As they progressed in the language sequence, they began to make changes in the forms or patterns of the sentence. The students' role was to respond orally, or occasionally in writing, to language stimuli. The students performed chorally, in small groups, and
finally individually. The teacher's role was to serve as a model, give the stimuli, listen with a critical ear, provide the language reinforcement to the stimuli presented, i.e., the correct response, and correct student errors. She was the agent to condition correct second-language habits.
As the students repeated the lines of the dialog and passed on to the structural drills, they were engaged in active responses that required them to practice the very structural and semantic elements they were to learn. They were occupied speaking the language rather than talking about it. Very little English was used in the classroom. Resorting to the mother tongue was not necessary, except for the occasional need to clarify meaning by means of the first language, when all visual aids, gestures, and explanations in the second language failed. Pattern drills were conducted without continually equating meaning with the first language. During this whole process of drilling the dialog and the structures, the students were carefully led in minimal steps through a series of drills in which the possibility of error was almost eliminated, and the opportunity for practice of forms was expanded to the fullest. The students were not supposed to analyze and search for answers but to respond immediately to the stimulus of the teacher, whether it be a line from a dialog that she was asking them to repeat or a pattern drill that she was asking them to perform. Classroom time was spent practicing correct forms rather than puzzling out answers based upon some little understood and perplexing language code.
The teacher who uses a text favoring the audio-lingual approach and who chooses to convert to an individualized program is faced with the problem of how to provide immediate reinforcement to the pattern drills. How is it possible to condition automatic responses to the drills when the students are at various points in the text? One possibility is to abandon the audio-lingual goal of automatic responses and to use the drills as a basis for the study of language patterns. If the teacher prefers to work toward automatic responses, the students can use tapes, practice with each other, do the drills orally while looking at the cues given in the text, or find an opportunity to practice individually with the teacher.
The dialog The students' first task is to master completely all the sounds and intonation patterns contained in the dialog. As the students study the dialog by mimicking the model provided by the teacher, tape, or record, they are learning to distinguish and to pronounce the sounds of the language. At the same time, they are learning to place these sounds in proper intonation patterns. Most important of all, they are growing accustomed to the sounds of the language, i.e., they are developing the ability to hold these strange new sounds in their minds and to process them. Until they can increase their
capacity to receive sentences of several syllables in length, they have little chance of ever being able to use the language orally.
While learning the sounds and intonation patterns of the language and improving their auditory memory, the students are also faced with the task of acquiring new vocabulary and new structures. Both are used in subsequent drills over the important language patterns. The important consideration from the audio-lingual point of view is that both are being learned in context as opposed to the more traditional word lists and the study of isolated examples of grammatical structures.
Depending upon the setting of the dialog situation, the students may also gain new insights into the people and their culture. This information may range from the historical to the political, from the economic to the social. The point is often made that such social practices as using the polite or familiar you in the second language is certainly a cultural concept and that a contextual situation is the best method of demonstrating and clarifying such cultural differences.
The students' task as they practice with the dialog is much more difficult and complex than seems apparent to the novice teacher. Learning the dialog completely is basic to their performance in the latter parts of the unit, and they have many different aspects of the language to absorb. Therefore, the teacher must be continually aware of her responsibility to model carefully and sufficiently before asking the students to repeat after her. Also, she should continue to practice and review the material until it has been thoroughly assimilated by the students.
Pattern drilling After becoming thoroughly familiar with the dialog lines, the students begin to manipulate these same semantic and structural elements in pattern drills. Pattern drills do not attempt to simulate communication. Their purpose is to enable the students to overlearn the structure involved to the point of automatic, nonthoughtful response. It is evident that the first-language speaker has an unconscious and automatic control of the various elements of his own language, and the objective of these drills is to develop a similar control of the basic structures in the second language. The students must necessarily reach this skill levei, at which point they can respond unconscious of the way in which they are putting words together, before they can successfully converse with a native speaker.
As they perform these drills, the students are learning the grammar point being practiced. By the process of analogy, i.e., perceiving identical patterns in similar structural relationships, the students are able to progress from one example to another. This placing of similar or identical structures and vocabulary items in related contexts also helps to demonstrate to the students the almost infinite number of possibilities of each. The correct answers
124 Part One: Theory
are to be supplied after each active response in class in order that the students be immediately reinforced. They are to learn correct forms from the beginning.
Application activities After the students have met the structure in context as part of the dialog to be practiced and drilled the same grammar point in pattern drills, they move on to some type of activity in which they have an opportunity to use these same forms which they have been practicing. These activities are more difficult than the previous drills. The students at this level are rather close to the goal, i.e., to be able to use the structure under consideration to communicate with someone else using these same grammatical forms. The purpose of these activities is to provide opportunities for the students to employ what they have been studying in practical situations and to assist them in transferring these learned forms to new contexts.
The unit ends with the students, hopefully, having the ability to use the content of the introductory dialog in a communicative context. In each unit there is a careful sequencing of activities in a continuously increasing level of difficulty. The students are led through minimal steps in order to avoid error as completely as possible. The object is to practice the correct forms until there is an automatic connection between the stimulus and its associated form. Throughout the sequence, the teacher is in control of all language practice as he seeks to condition correct language habits.