9
The 1940s and 1950s
•Audiolingualism (in the US) and the Oral Approach (in Britain) both view pronunciation as very important and is taught explicitly from the start. As in the Direct Method classroom, the teacher (or a recording) models a sound, a word, or an utterance and the students imitate or repeat. However, the teacher also typically makes use of information from phonetics, such as a visual transcription system (modified IPA or some other system) or charts that demonstrate the articulation of sounds.
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•Then the contrastive minimal pair drill was introduced at this period of time. This technique, based on the concept of the phoneme as a minimally distinctive sound (Bloomfield, 1933), is used for both listening practice and guided oral production.