Audiolingual learning started during World War II

The next "revolution" in terms of language teaching methodology coincided with World War II, when America became aware that it needed people to learn foreign languages very quickly as part of its overall military operations. The "Army Method" was suddenly developed to build communicative competence in translators through very intensive language courses focusing on aural-oral skills. This, in combination with some new ideas about language learning coming from the disciplines of descriptive linguistics and behavioral psychology, went on to become what is known as the Audiolingual Method (ALM).

This new method incorporated many of the features typical of the earlier Direct Method, but the disciplines mentioned above added the concepts of teaching "linguistic patterns" in combination with "habit-forming". This method was one of the first to have its roots "firmly grounded in linguistic and psychological theory" (Brown 1994:57), which apparently added to its credibility and probably had some influence in the popularity it enjoyed over a long period of time. It also had a major influence on the language teaching methods that were to follow, and can still be seen in major or minor manifestations of language teaching methodology even to this day.

The method gained popularity because it was considered successful

Another factor that accounted for the method's popularity was the "quick success" it achieved in leading learners towards communicative competence. Through extensive mimicry, memorization and "over-learning" of language patterns and forms, students and teachers were often able to see immediate results. This was both its strength and its failure in the long run, as critics started to point out that the method did not deliver in terms of producing long-term communicative abilities.

Just as with the Direct Method that preceded it, the overall goal of the Audiolingual Method was to create communicative competence in learners, however it was thought that the most effective way to do this was for students to "overlearn" the language being studied through extensive repetition and a variety of elaborate drills.

The idea was to project the linguistic patterns of the language (based on the studies of structural linguists) into the minds of the learners in a way that made responses automatic and "habitual". To this end it was held that the language "habits" of the first language would constantly interfere, and the only way to overcome ths problem was to facilitate the learning of a new set of "habits" appropriate linguistically to the language being studied.