ABSTRACT
Early views of teaching languages considered listening to be a passive skill that would develop naturally with speaking and reading. A dominant model during this period was the well-known audio-lingual method (often called the Michigan Method because some of its early pioneers taught at the University of Michigan), a style of loosely based on behaviorist theory. Practitioners treated language proficiency fundamentally as behavior that could be “trained” through a system of graded input and reinforcement for correct responses. Language instruction often included a language lab, in which the instructor would present correct audiotaped models of sentences and the students would have to repeat them verbatim (i.e. listen and repeat) or provide grammatical transformations (e.g. listen and change the sentence to a question, change the verb to past tense) or lexical transformation (e.g. change ‘the boy’ to ‘the girl’). Students were expected to acquire the language through repeated oral manipulation of these highly comprehensible and graded pieces of well-formed input.
