Comparison Between the Audio Lingual Method and the Communicative Approach
By Loubna Flah
Morocco World News
Casablanca, May 6, 2013
Language as a human artifact can be approached from manifold vintage points depending on the focal point predetermined. If we are concerned about the communicational aspect, then language represents a codified message produced by a sender intercepted by a receiver through a channel.
But once language is submerged in an ampler context, then the scope of vision should include the miscellany of social factors that impinge on the speaker‘s word choice. In this perspective, language constituted a social behavior or a cultural trait since it is essentially conditioned by social conventions and alternately manipulated by the interlocutor’s intentions. Language becomes unequivocally a harbinger of social status manifested in various aspects such as the speaker’s accent, style and the frequency of code switching. Language can also reveal political affiliation as it can also give a retrospect about a nation history.
However, the matter becomes more intricate when language is approached through its dialogical relation with the Human mind. The old philosophical debate about language and the mind can be rekindled once again. There is no argument that language is first constructed in the mind according to the conventional rules of morphology (word formation), semantics (meaning) and syntax (structure). The only difference resides in the fact that linguistic structure designed in the mind is not confronted to the constraints of air movement in the vocal apparatus.
Yet, we cannot deny that during the process of thinking we can hear sounds though they have not been uttered yet. It is indeed the image of the sound that is retrieved from the large repertoire of sounds. In other words, the mind has the ability to visualize the way the sound would come out once uttered.
The individual can easily determine whether the sound is a bilabial (produced by the lips) or pharyngeal (produced at the level of the pharynx whereas the
Morocco World News
Casablanca, May 6, 2013
Language as a human artifact can be approached from manifold vintage points depending on the focal point predetermined. If we are concerned about the communicational aspect, then language represents a codified message produced by a sender intercepted by a receiver through a channel.
But once language is submerged in an ampler context, then the scope of vision should include the miscellany of social factors that impinge on the speaker‘s word choice. In this perspective, language constituted a social behavior or a cultural trait since it is essentially conditioned by social conventions and alternately manipulated by the interlocutor’s intentions. Language becomes unequivocally a harbinger of social status manifested in various aspects such as the speaker’s accent, style and the frequency of code switching. Language can also reveal political affiliation as it can also give a retrospect about a nation history.
However, the matter becomes more intricate when language is approached through its dialogical relation with the Human mind. The old philosophical debate about language and the mind can be rekindled once again. There is no argument that language is first constructed in the mind according to the conventional rules of morphology (word formation), semantics (meaning) and syntax (structure). The only difference resides in the fact that linguistic structure designed in the mind is not confronted to the constraints of air movement in the vocal apparatus.
Yet, we cannot deny that during the process of thinking we can hear sounds though they have not been uttered yet. It is indeed the image of the sound that is retrieved from the large repertoire of sounds. In other words, the mind has the ability to visualize the way the sound would come out once uttered.
The individual can easily determine whether the sound is a bilabial (produced by the lips) or pharyngeal (produced at the level of the pharynx whereas the