The Audiolingual Method is a method for foreign language teaching which emphasized the teaching of listening and speaking before reading and writing. This method is combination between behavioral psychology and linguistic. It’s also called “Army Method” because this method is appeared since the World War II for the American armies who had to learn language quickly and intensively. The structural theory of language constituted its backbone.Structural linguistic view language as a system of structurally related elements for the expression of meaning. These elements are phonemes, morphemes, words, structures and sentence types. The language teaching theoreticians and methodologists is behavioral psychology which is is an empirically based approach to the study of human behavior. Behaviorism tries to explain how an external even (a stimulus ) caused a change in the behavior of an individual (a response) without using concept like ”mind” or “idea”.
In the Audiolingual Method, the students first hear a language. Later, they speak the language and after that, they read and write in it. Mother tongue is discouraged in the classroom when this method is used. The Audiolingual Method does not learn lots of vocabulary. Rather, the teacher drills speaking and grammar because in this method, grammar is most important for the student. In other word, the student must repeat grammar pattern after the teacher.