Audio-Lingual Method By Ika, Sarniati and St.Hariati

AUDIO- LINGUAL METHOD

I.     Introduction

Audio- lingual method is developed in the time of 1960’s. It was first developed in United States during Word War II. At that time many soldier needed to learn foreign language for immediately military purposes. Therefore this method also called army method. The purpose of the method is to clarify student’s pronunciation and train their ability in listening

This approach to language learning was similar to another, earlier method called the Direct method. Like the Direct Method, the Audio-Lingual Method advised that students be taught a language directly, without using the students’ native language to explain new words or grammar in the target language. However, unlike the Direct Method, the Audiolingual Method didn’t focus on teaching vocabulary. Rather, the teacher drilled students in the use of grammar.

Charles Fries (1945), the director of the English Language Institute at the University of Michigan, the first of its kind in the United States, believed that learning structure or grammar was the starting point for the student. In other words, it was the students’ job to orally recite the basic sentence patterns and grammatical structures. The students were only given “enough vocabulary to make such drills possible.

Read more »

Tweet

Critics of Total Physical Response (TPR) Method By Ika, Sarniati and St. Hariati

           I.       INTRODUCTION

            Total Physical Response (TPR) developed by James Asher (1982) Learning another language through actions: The complete teachers’ guidebook.

            The method was designed primarily for students in the early stages of language acquisition.  Since commands can be made comprehensible to students with very limited language, Asher used commands as the basis for TPR. The teacher or a more proficient student gives a command, demonstrates the command, and then students respond physically to the command.  Because students are actively involved and not expected to repeat the command, anxiety is low, and student focus is on comprehension rather than production.  Hence, they demonstrate comprehension before their speaking skills emerge.

Read more »

Tweet

Competence and Performance and Imitation

COMPETENCE AND PERFORMANCE

Competence is the ability to produce an unlimited number of sentences with the knowledge of limited number of grammatical rules. Competence consists of the knowledge of language user in principle has. Performance is imperfect manifestation of competence. Performance is the result of the psychological process that employs this knowledge in producing or interpreting language utterance. Chomsky separates competence and performance; he describes  'competence' as an idealized capacity that is located as a psychological or mental property or function and ‘performance’ as the production of actual utterances.   In short, competence involves “knowing” the language and performance involves “doing” something with the language. The difficulty with this construct is that it is very difficult to assess competence without assessing performance.  

Why is it important to make a distinction between competence and performance?

Noting the distinction between competence and performance is useful primarily because it allows those studying a language to differentiate between a speech error and not knowing something about the language. To understand this distinction, it is helpful to think about a time when you've made some sort of error in your speech. For example, let's say you are a native speaker of English and utter the following:

Read more »

Tweet