Oral approach

Oral approach and situational language teaching  

A Oral approach

The theory on which the approach is based implies the acquisition of oral language skills through oral practice based on repetition and learning by analogy. The Aural-Oral Approach is based on the belief that language is essentially acquired through habits and that responses must be drilled until they become natural and automatic. This reflects a behaviorist’s view of language learning influenced by the psychologist Skinner.

The method aims at developing listening and speaking first as the foundation on which to build the skills of reading and writing. This means that before the learners are taught how to read and write the language structures, they should first be brought to proficiency in oral and aural use of these structures. The following are the assumptions on which this method is based:

1.   Language is speech not writing 
2.  Language is a set of habits.  This principle means that language is acquired by imitation and practice. Habits are established by stimulus, response and reinforcement. 
3. Teach the language, not about the language. This means that we must teach the pupils a set of  habits,  not  a  set  of  rules  to  enable  them  to  talk  in  the  language  not  to  talk  about  the language.  A language is what its native speakers  say, not what  someone thinks  they ought  to say,  we should deal with language as it is and not prescribe what other people say.

Shortcomings

1. This method encouraged successful responses and manipulation of language and disregarded meaning.  So,  pupils  especially  at  the  early  stages  of  language  instruction  have  to  repeat incomprehensible material to make the production of speech automatic and habitual. In this way the  method  fails  to  prepare  the  learner  to  use  the  foreign  language  for  meaningful communication.
2.  Mechanical drills and repetition can be effective in the early stages of language instruction or for the teaching of certain aspects of language, but they are not necessarily conducive to real communication. 
3. The  focus  on  mechanical  repetition  through  the  use  of  oral  drills  leads  also  to  a  complete negligence of creative use of language and cognition. 
4. Too much emphasis is put on speech at the expense of other language skills. However, there is no reason why all language skills should not be taught simultaneously instead of being introduced in a certain order, i.e., listening, speaking, reading and writing. 

B. The Situational Approach

This approach emerged and dominated the language teaching field in Britain during the 1940's, 1950's and 1960's.  It  includes  aspects  of  the  Direct  Method  and  of  the  emerging  field  of language  pedagogy.  This method was used in Algeria  through  L.G. Alexander's Practice and Progress (1967). This textbook was used for the three secondary school years.

 The characteristics of the Situational Approach are summarized as follows:

1. The spoken language is primary. 
2. All language material is practiced orally before being presented in written form (reading and  writing  are  taught  only  after  an  oral  base  in  lexical  and  grammatical  forms  has  been established.
3. Only the target language should be used in the classroom  
4. Efforts are made to ensure that the most general and useful lexical items are presented. 
5.    Grammatical structures are graded from simple to complex. 
6.   New  items  (lexical  and  grammatical)  are  introduced  and  practiced  situationally  (e.g.  at the post-office, at the bank, at the dinner table…)

Another important feature of this method is the presentation of sentences in association with  actions,  mime,  realia  and  visual  aids  (like  the  Direct  Method).  So  the  structures  of  the language  are  presented  and  practiced  by  the  use  of  physical  demonstration  of  notions  and objects. Utterances are illustrated by simulation of actions, pictures and other real objects. In this method, the teacher occupies a central role, for he takes on the responsibility for varying  drills  and  tasks  and  choosing  the  appropriate  situations  to  practice  structures. Moreover, he acts as a model to be imitated by the pupils who are required to listen and repeat. Active  verbal  interaction  between  the  teacher  and  the  pupils  is  of  vital  importance  in  this method. In fact language learning is seen to be the direct result of this interaction.  

 Shortcomings

1. The situations that are created are pedagogic, bearing little resemblance to natural language use. 
2.  Learners are not shown how the use of a structure in a particular situation can be generalized to another situation. 
3. The situations are not graded, but selected at random to serve the purpose of the structures on which they are based.   
4. It  is  not  possible  to  enumerate  all  the  situations  that  the  learners    are  likely  to  meet in reality