acquisition of structures and patterns in common everyday dialogue. These patterns are elicited,
repeated and tested until the responses given by the student in the foreign language are
automatic.
It uses the target language communicatively, over learn it, so as to be able to use it
automatically by forming new habits in the target language and overcoming native language
habits.
As Cook stated in „Second Language Learning”, audio-lingual teaching divided
language into the four skills of listening, speaking, 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 writing, passive skills should come before active skills. So students should listen before
they speak, speak before they read, read before they write.
Learning means learning structures and vocabulary, which together add up to learning
the language. Like the academic style, language is seen more as form than meaning, even if its
basis is more in structural than traditional grammar. Oddly enough, despite its emphasis on the
spoken language, the structures it teaches are predominantly from written language.(Cook)
The goal of the audio-lingual style is to get the students to ‘behave’ in common L
situations, such as the station or the supermarket; it is concerned with the real life activities the
students are going to face. In one sense it is practical and communication-oriented. The audio-
lingual style is not about learning language for its own sake, but learning it for actual use, either
within the society or without.(Cook)
According to St. Krashen (1981), an audio-lingual lesson usually begins with a dialogue
which contains the grammar and vocabulary to be focused on the lesson. The students mimic the
dialogue and eventually memorize it. After the dialogue comes pattern drills, in which the
grammatical structure introduced in the dialogue is reinforced, with these drills focusing on
simple repetition, substitution, transformation and translation.
Grammar is taught inductively after the selection of grammar structures and the
provision of minimal grammatical explanation. It contains, in embryo, many techniques later
developed by the Communicative Approach.
5.1.9 Cognitivism (The Structural Situational Approach)The Cognitive Approach, influenced by the cognitive psychology and the Chomskyan
linguistic, contradicts the habit-formation learning style proposed by the Audiolingualism,
suggesting that language learning consists in fact of rule acquisition. Thus, grammar plays a very