“Repeat after me”
Lots of terrible and disturbing things become very popular in the 70s and 80s. Two things I’m very glad I wasn’t around to witness firsthand have got to be Fanny Craddock’s television programmes and the horror that is Audiolingualism.
This approach is best described as learning by rote through highly structured repetition drills. In its simplest form, the teacher stands at the front and reads a sentence; the students repeat it back in unison. The idea is that the teacher is providing a model which the students must emulate. Students often had to memorise quite lengthy dialogues and frequently had no idea what on earth it was they were actually saying. This approach was hugely popular in the 70s and early 80s in the UK, but here’s a truly abominable and comically sexist example from 90s America involving a vacuum cleaner salesman....
Audiolingualism is a heavily (or almost entirely) teacher-led approach which views successful language learning as synonymous with habit-formation. It may have had its heyday in the 70s and 80s, but it’s been around for much, much longer. Perhaps the most famous implementation of Audiolingual ideas was the so-called Army Method employed by the US Army’s Specialised Training Program, established in 1941. This programme saw thousands of personnel drilled in basic conversational abilities in a variety of languages including Japanese, Korean, Russian and Arabic (it’s quite difficult to find anything documenting the actual success or otherwise of this programme- get in touch if you know of any sources).
The audiolingualism adherents formalised this faculties-numbing ‘method’ in the Frankensteinian creation of so-called ‘language labs’.
These were rooms in schools and adult education centres in which learners sat in siloes, plugged into a cassette tape or reel with endless sentences to repeat. They even plugged Charles Windsor into one at Aberystwyth University when he dropped by for a few months to learn some Welsh.
These tapes usually had sci-fiesque sounds and constant instructional phrases such as “écoutez et répetez!” In some labs you would record yourself parroting these sentences and then listen back to your garbled nonsense attempts so you could hear how comically deviating it was when compared against the model voice.
I thought Audiolingualism was longdead ‘til I did my PGCE in 2015. Unfortunately it’s alive and kicking in second language classes, especially at Key Stage 3 level. It’s not just rote-learning in speaking and writing exercises, but also more excruciating instantiations such as the horror that is the use of song in second language classrooms. 35 eleven year olds all stuffed into a tiny Carmarthenshire classroom chanting the lyrics to ‘Moi, j'ai soif, je voudrais en orangina’ is enough to make anyone want to run screaming into the River Tywi.
Elements of Audiolingualism also live on in adult language classes in drilling exercises. Sometimes these are simply exercises in which you repeat whatever the teacher in saying, but sometimes the drilling exercise gets learners to regurgitate a set response to a question:
Teacher prompt: Who did you watch the film with?
Zombified student response: I watched it with my friend
Usually in such drilling exercises, learners are given one word answers on a sheet of paper and their response has them changing some element of the sentence in some way. In the above example, the learner has to throw back the conjugated form of the verb ‘to watch’.
Before we look at some negatives of Audiolingual approaches, is there anything positive about this method at all? Probably not… Well, perhaps the only thing I can think of is that it is true that you do need a model for the language you’re learning. Drilling and other rote-learning activities provide multiple instances of exposure to particular words and phrases. This kind of highly structured approach can be good for the first 2 or 3 classes in a completely new language when you’re just tuning into the language and getting started. But it’s something you need to quickly move away from.
Why? Well, because firstly, it doesn’t work as a long-term language learning strategy. If successful language learning were simply a matter of repetition, then there would be no need for language teachers, classrooms or lived experiences in the second language. Whilst it’s true that drilling phrases might mean you can response to the prompt you’re given, this is just a form of Pavlovian conditioning. When you’re out in the world trying to use the language you’re learning, you won’t always be given prompts by speakers that recreate the controlled learning tasks that the Audiolingual classroom provides. In order to use a language and learn more, we all need to use it creatively. This doesn’t mean writing poetry, it just means using the language independently and generating your own sentences which convey what you want to say in a way you want to say it in response to sentences you’ve perhaps never heard before, instead of just parrotting a phrase you’ve learned in class.
The other main reason you should avoid Audiolingual approaches, is that it transports you to a level of torturous boredom so acute that you imagined it to be beyond the human experience. Otto Jespersen summed up the situation pretty well in 1910 when he wrote":
Everybody knows the manner in which corrections of pronunciation were generally made in old-fashioned classes, and how they are still made by too many teachers, even among those who have themselves acquired a good pronunciation of the language they are teaching. The pupil reads some word in some miserably erroneous way, the teacher stops him and pronounces the word in, let us assume, the correct way. The pupil tries to imitate that pronunciation, but fails, and thus we have an endless repetition of the same word by the teacher, followed very often on the part of the pupil by an equally endless repetition of nearly the same bad pronunciation as before, tempered as often as not by mistakes in the opposite direction, the pupil shooting over the mark where before he had shot below the mark. By dint of enormous patience much may no doubt be achieved in this way; but the way is long and laborious, and so tedious that generally all attempts are given up after some time, with no visible result except that of some precious time lost to both parties concerned.
