ulea Octavia-Maria 2nd year MA student in English Linguistics

The Communicative Approach vs. the Audio-Lingual Method. A Contrastive Analysis

1. Introduction. The premises

In this paper I will attempt to make a contrastive analysis of the Communicative Approach and the Audio-Lingual Method, two didactical methods used in the teaching of foreign languages. In order to do so, an exposition of the different settings from which these two methods emerged and of their different perspectives on (second) language acquisition is first necessary. Chronologically, the first method to be developed, out of the two, was the AudioLingual one, which appeared in United States in the context of World War II, when there was a high need for people to quickly learn a foreign language. Because of its use in the army during the war, it is also known as the Military or Army Method. This approach was born in the positivist tradition of the social sciences (based on the model given by the natural sciences), the scientific method, ground-breaking at the time, which believed one could observe everything as it is objectively. In linguistics, this meant a rigorous application of the scientific principle of observation of human languages. Only the publicly observable responses could be subject to investigation. The linguists task, according to the structuralist, was to describe human languages and to identify the structural characteristics of those languages (Brown, 1994, p. 8). In psychology, this meant behaviorism. Thus, learning a language, from the audio-lingual perspective, was seen as a process of habit formation, aided by positive reinforcement of correct habits and negative reinforcement of mistakes, which were seen as a result of habits acquired with the first language. Unlike previous methods, such as the classic grammar-translation, due to the context, the audio-lingual did shift towards learning a language in order to communicate orally and aurally. However, the way in which it attempted to achieve this, as will be discussed in the following sections, has been questioned and is now often discarded mainly due to its ultimate failure to teach long-term communicative proficiency (Brown, 1994, p. 75). The Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) appeared in Britain in the late 60s, after structuralist methods, such as the audio-lingual one in USA and the situational one in
1

Britain, began to be questioned about their adequacy in language teaching, both from the perspective of the underlying theoretical foundations and from the perspective of the inability of the student to transfer the skills obtained in the classroom to real communication outside the classroom (Richards and Rodgers, 1999, p. 59). The main critic of the underlying structuralist ideas at the time was Noam Chomsky with his now famous book Syntactic Structures (1957), in which he argued that the fundamental characteristics of natural languages (creativity and uniqueness) were unaccounted for by the standard structural theories. His Cognitive Approach to language acquisition (1959), which coined the distinction between performance and linguistic competence, were a primary theoretical influence for the future communicative method. Upon this basis, came the notion of communicative competence as coined by Hymes (1972). In Hymes view (1972, p. 281), a person who acquires communicative competence in a language acquires both knowledge and ability for language use with respect to: 1. whether something is formally possible; 2. whether something is feasible in virtue of the means of implementation available; 3. whether something is appropriate (adequate, happy, successful) in relation to a context it is used and evaluated; 4. whether something is in fact done, actually performed, and what its doing entails. The theory of knowing what a language entails, offered a much more comprehensive view than Chomskys view of linguistic competence, which dealt primarily with abstract grammatical knowledge. Thus, a dichotomy was drawn between the structural/behavioral emphasis on manipulating grammatical forms and achieving accuracy, and the new emphasis on communicative competence and the use of language to fulfill its communicative function, concentrating on fluency. Both accuracy and fluency are necessary parts of linguistic competence, yet the fundamental aspect of human language that had not been adequately addressed by structural language teaching was the functional and communicative one. While, with structuralist methods, such as the audio-lingual one, much emphasis was put on achieving mastery of structures in the target language, with the communicative outlook on language teaching came the revival of the traditional concept that utterances carried meaning in themselves and expressed the meanings and intentions of the speakers and writers who created them (Howatt, 1984, p. 280).
2

The beginning of the 70s was also the period for language teaching in which the idea of breaking down learning tasks into units emerged (Richards and Rodgers, 1999, p. 66). Each of these units was devised to complete the other, while addressing different needs of the learner. The first communicative syllabuses for language teaching were developed following British linguist Wilkins (communicative) definition of language, first stated in 1972 and expanded upon in his book Notional Syllabuses (1976), and his analysis of the communicative meanings that a language learner needs to understand and express. Since then, the scope of CLT has expanded and is now viewed more as an approach (rather than a method) whose language teaching main goal is communicative competence and which aims to develop procedures for the development of the four language skills in the target language. Finally, Howatt distinguishes between a weak version of the communicative approach, which aims to provide learners with opportunities to use their knowledge of the target language for communicative purposes, and a strong version, which claims that learning the target language can only be achieved by using it in communicative contexts (Howatt, 1984, p. 279). In what follows, I will first look at and compare the techniques and materials used in practice for each of the two methods/ approaches and then go deeper and analyze the principles underlying them.

2. Comparing the materials and techniques used

The audio-lingual method uses dialog form as the main vehicle for introducing new material and often begins the lesson with a dialog read aloud by the teacher to the class. The technique used here is that of memorizing the dialog through mimicry of the teacher, which, in an instance of this technique, would first read out the full dialog to the class, then have the students repeat each line and afterwards do the lines belonging to only one speaker, while the teacher does the others, and then would switch roles with the class. An instance of such a dialog, used for beginners of English, is as follows: SALLY: Good morning, Bill. BILL: Good morning, Sally. SALLY: How are you? BILL: Fine, thanks. And you? SALLY: Fine. Where are you going? BILL: Im going to the post office.
3

SALLY: I am too. Shall we go together? BILL: Sure. Lets go. As is evident from the example, the dialog is solely focused on teaching structure, rather than on communicating meaning, which makes it feel artificial and out of place. The teacher then uses this dialog as a basis for drilling exercises. The communicative approach, on the other hand, when teaching a class sufficiently prepared (intermediate and up) to understand the material given, insists on using authentic language materials, including dialogs, news paper articles, weather forecasts, etc., precisely in order to overcome the typical problems students have with transferring what they learn in the classroom to the outside world. For lower level classes (beginners), the use of realia that do not contain a lot of language (such as menus), but that have the potential of stimulating a lot of discussion, is often recommended by advocates of the communicative approach. Because the main purpose of the language used in the authentic materials presented by the communicative teacher (which were produced by native speakers of the target language) is to convey meaning rather than to overtly display knowledge of grammatical structure, the learners are never expected to memorize the material (i.e. dialog), but rather understand its meaning and observe the link between meaning and structure. Drilling is the central tool in audio-lingualism, and is incorporated in the method with all its possible forms: expansion drills, which break up the problematic lines of dialog into smaller parts that are repeated incrementally; repetition drills, which require the students to repeat what the teacher says as accurately as possible; chain drills, which involve each student asking the other, in a chain, a question selected by the teacher; single-slot substitution, which involves one line, usually from the dialog, having one slot substituted with the words provided by the teacher; multiple-slot substitution, which involves one line, usually from the dialog, having any part of it substituted with the phrases provided by the teacher; it requires the student to recognize what part of speech each of the phrases is and where it would fit in the dialog line; transformation drills, which require the student to transform a given sentence into different types of sentences (questions, negative sentences, etc.);
4

question-and-answer drills, which give the learners practice in asking and answering questions.

This is how the audio-lingual method attempts to develop mastery of the target language in the learner. Through these drills, language items are not necessarily contextualized but are expected to be taken for granted, which, again, leads to a lot more attention being given to form, rather than meaning. Unlike dialog memorization, drilling is not completely ignored in the communicative approach, however, it remains peripheral. In the audio-lingual method, the student is restricted to the lines of the dialogues, the sentences and cues used in drills, and only after a long process of rigid drills and exercises do they come to be involved in communicative activities. In the communicative approach, however, students, from the very beginning, are given opportunity to express themselves creatively and produce meaning in the target language, while remaining in the boundaries of the given context. Two of the communicative tools used to enable students to do so are role-playing games and picture strip stories. While in the audio-lingual method, students role-play only within the boundaries of the given dialogue, by repeating the lines pertaining to one of the two speakers, in the communicative approach, a much intricate concept of role-playing is applied. The students are given situations or social contexts in which to play a social role by saying whatever thing they find appropriate, if the role-playing game is less structured, or by saying what the teacher advises according to context, if the game is more structured. Role-playing in the communicative approach is thus a central tool for enabling students to use the target language creatively but also socially contextualized, whereas, in the audio-lingual method, role-playing of this type is completely absent. Picture strip stories can be used in many communicative language games, or activities involving an information gap, choice, and feedback. In an instance of such activity, one student in a small group is given a strip story; he then shows the first picture of the strip to the rest of the group and asks them to predict what the next picture would look like. After each member has given his/her prediction, the picture is revealed. This activity is truly communicative, in the way defined by Morrow (Johnson and Morrow, 1981), because an information gap existed (the other members of the group didnt know what the picture was), they had a choice as to what the prediction would be and how one would express it, and they received feedback not on the form (there was no error correction involved at this production stage), but on the content of their predictions by being able to compare it with that of the picture. These types of games involve no mindless repetition of structures, as do the grammar
5

games used in the audio-lingual method, but rather activities which may be structured so that all the members of the group participate in negotiating meaning, developing their ability to use the linguistic system effectively and appropriately. Fill in the gaps type of activities, however, do occur in the audio-lingual class, yet these gaps are erased words in the dialogs that are already presented to the learners and that are supposed to be memorized, so the missing information should already be known by the students and is not something that elicits rational thought in problem solving or meaning negotiating. Games where the students are asked to unscramble sentences, text fragments, dialog lines or pictures to produce coherent sequences are another activity typical of the communicative approach. The material used may be familiar to the students, if they are younger or at a lower level of competence in the target language, or completely new, if the learners are proficient enough. These sentence unscrambling games teach students how sentences are bound together at the suprasentential level through formal linguistic devices such as anaphors, which make a text cohesive, and semantic propositions, which unify a text and make it coherent. Through this type of activity coupled with the feedback given by the teacher at the end (the orders chosen by the students are discussed and the correct one is always given), the learners are trained to distinguish between good and bad discourse within the target language. This is something that is not addressed by the audio-lingual method, which only touches upon the correct placement (based on their part of speech) of words or phrases in a sentence through single-slot and multiple-slot substitution drills at the sentential level. Also, group and pair work is something rarely done in audio-lingualism. Grammatical explanations are avoided (grammar is taught by inductive analogy rather than deductive explanation) and the use of the learners native language or translations at early stages is forbidden in the audio-lingual method, while the communicative approach allows all three if they are seen by the teacher as feasible, useful or necessary. Reading and writing can start from the first day in the communicative approach, if so desired, while the audio-lingual methods postpone these until speech is mastered.

3. Comparing the underlying principles

The two methods firstly differ in their assumptions about what second language acquisition is and how it takes place. As presented in the first section, the audio-lingual method adopts a behaviorist approach, by seeing language learning as habit formation. Because of this, teachers who use the method believe that, in order for their students to be able to use the target language to communicate, they need to overlearn the target language,
6

to learn to use it without stopping to think. This is why they are bombarded with repetition and question-and-answer drills which require very little thinking on their part. On the other hand, communicative approaches, following Chomsky and they Hymes, see language acquisition as the gradual, creative build up of knowledge systems, resulting in improved general competence and not just performance of habits in isolated instances. Communicative competence from this approach, differs drastically in meaning from the one sought after by audio-lingualists in that, here, it involves being able to use the language appropriately to a given context and to be able to figure out the intentions of the speaker or writer. To achieve this, the communicative approach believes that the student needs knowledge not only of linguistic form, but also (mainly) of meanings and functions. From the main techniques employed, surfaces this same contrast between what each method, the audio-lingual and the communicative, finds important in emphasizing: the first attends to structure and form more than meaning by employing artificial material specifically designed to teach target language structures, while for the latter meaning is paramount and form, presented through authentic material and elicited through communicative language games, is a vehicle used to communicate and negotiate meaning. Thus, we see, in fact, that the competence sought by the audio-lingual method is rather a linguistic one, than a proper communicative one. The communicative approach sees grammar as necessary for communication to occur, but not sufficient by itself. Students, in the communicative classroom, need grammatical explanations, translations, drills and exercises, when and only when they are appropriate, while in the audio-lingual one, grammar is the main thing taught, but never explicitly and mainly through drills. Accuracy, in terms of formal correctness, is a primary goal in the audio-lingual method, while fluency and acceptable language is sought after by communicative teachers, which see accuracy as something judged in context and not abstractly. Another aspect in which the two diverge is in the treatment of mistakes. As mentioned above, the audio-lingual method, which follows the structural/behavioral approach to second language acquisition and learning, views mistakes as interference from the habits developed in using the first language effectively. These habits prevent the learner from using the target language correctly and are therefore best eradicated. Contrastive Analysis was developed as a means of contrasting native and target languages to help the teacher predict what errors might occur in language learning. Such analysis has proved useful in some ways, particularly with regard to pronunciation, but takes very little account of the learner.
7

On the other hand, communicative approaches have a very different way of viewing mistakes. They follow the cognitive language learning premise that language learners actively construct their own rule system, based on their present knowledge of the target language, backed up by their knowledge of how languages work in general, which includes their native language and any other languages they may already know. These rule systems - mental maps of the target language - gradually improve over time as learners experiment and learn by trial and error. Thus, errors are a result of the evolving rule system. The learner actively forms hypotheses about the target language, which he or she then employs. However, the rule system is oversimplified, resulting in errors, which the learner can then use to modify and improve their knowledge of the target language, gradually becoming more and more sophisticated, and errors occur less. Common types of errors include overgeneralization, transfer, and omission/ redundancy reduction, all of which are part of the same underlying learning strategy. Evaluation in the audio lingual method is done by focusing on one point of the language at a time; students might be asked to distinguish between words in minimal pairs or to supply a sentence with the correct verb form. In contrast, evaluation in the communicative approach is done by focusing both on accuracy and on fluency. The principle underlying this is that the student who has the most control of the structures is not necessarily the best communicator. The final points in which the two methods differ is in the role of the teacher and of the student and in the student-teacher/student-student interactions. In the audio-lingual method, the teacher is like an orchestra leader, or a military drill instructor, thoroughly directing and leading the behavior of the students, through rigid, almost military, drills and repetitive exercises. Audio-lingual teachers are responsible for providing their students with a good model for imitation, since all materials used are artificial and most of the time devised by the teachers themselves with the purpose of teaching the target language. The students in an audio-lingual classroom, thus, are imitators of the teachers model or the material he/she supplies. They follow the teachers direction and respond as accurately and as rapidly as possible. With the exception of chain drills and dialog line reading, which are both strongly teacher-directed, there is virtually no student to student interaction in this type of classroom, the only interaction being the one between the teacher and the students, which is initiated and directed by the teacher. Thus, this method is highly teacher-centered. In contrast, in the communicative classroom, the teacher, rather than a military sergeant, is mainly a facilitator of his students learning, which enables him/her to have many
8

roles to fulfill. He is the manager of the classroom activities, in which role his major responsibility is to create activities likely to trigger communication. During the activities, his role is either that of an advisor, answering students questions and monitoring their performance, or that of a co-communicator by fully engaging in the communicative activity together with the students (Littlewood, 1981). Students of a communicative classroom are seen as communicators. They are actively engaged in the negotiation of meaning, in the attempt to make themselves understood and understand others even when their knowledge of the target language is incomplete. The teachers role, in the communicative approach, is less dominant, which makes the approach less teacher-centered and enables students to feel more responsible of their own learning and act as self-managers. Other roles of the communicative teacher include need analyst, counselor, evaluator and researcher of the appropriate activities that will lead the students forward in their foreign language learning. Regarding the student to student and the teacher to student interactions in the communicative approach, the teacher is viewed as an initiator of the activities, as is the case with the audio-lingual method, but he does not always interact himself with the students, while in the audio-lingual method he almost exclusively does so. Sometimes the communicative teacher is a co-communicator but more often he establishes situations which prompt communication between and among students which leads to a very strong student-to student interaction, in the form of pairs, triads, small groups, and a whole group. These types of interactions are the basis of this method, but almost lack in the audio-lingual one. With respect to the way in which each method deals with the feelings of the student, the audio-lingual one fails to provide a principle that would relate to this area and follows the assumption that the intrinsic motivation of the students to learn the target language will spring from their interest in the structure of the language. On the other hand, the way in which the communicative approach deals with the feelings of the students regarding the process of learning a foreign language is based upon the assumption that students will be more motivated to study a foreign language if they feel they are learning to do something useful (functional) with the language they study. The principle here is that the intrinsic motivation of the student to learn the target language springs from an interest in what is being communicated by the language. Also, the students are being given opportunities to express themselves in the target language, by sharing their opinions and ideas, which leads them to integrate the foreign language in their personality, and feel more at ease with it and their sense of security is enhanced through the many opportunities they receive for cooperative interactions with their fellow students and teachers.
9

4. Conclusions
Although theoretically consistent at the levels of language and learning, the communicative language teaching is best considered an approach rather than a method, due to the greater room for individual interpretation and variation at the level of design and procedure. It appeared at a time when British and North American language teaching were ready for a paradigm shift, leaving Situational and Audio-Lingual methods behind. It appealed to those who wanted a more humanistic approach to language teaching, one in which the communicational aspect of language received priority. Due to CLT receiving approval from leading British applied linguists, language specialists, publishers as well as institutions, it was rapidly adopted.

References
Brown, H. Douglas. 1994. Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. New Jersey: Prentice Hall Howatt, A. P. R. 1984. A History of English Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press Johnson, K. and Morrow, K. editors. 1981. Communication in the classroom. London: Longman. Littlewood, W. 1981. Communicative Language Teaching: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Richards, Jack C. and Rodgers, S. Theodore. 1999. Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press

10