Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1989. 19/3. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 19)

Kovács, Éva: The History of Teaching Vocabulary

139 there are pauses. intonation,, exclamatory noises. (West I960: 160) ? think it Is a justified requirement i. e. besides words we should teach these non-verbal elements of the language an well. West calls his method the realistic nett »od and says that is should he introduced as early as possible, foreign language learners in the early stages are learning merely a language without a behaviour pattern; hence their language work is to some extent unreal and uninteresting. The earlier we can introduce behaviour into language teaching, the more successful the final outcome will be in respect of realism and naturalism in the end product (West 1960: 161). Corder's contextual method arid West's realistic method both of which regard language as a verbal behaviour served as a basis for ttie audio-visual method. V. THE AUDIO-VISUAL METHOD The common feature of the contextual method and the audio-visual method is that the context of situation is in the foreground in both of them. There are, however, also some differences between Corder's and West's method and the audio-visual method: The audio-visual method uses picture-strips or slides In present a situation, thus television is not an integral part of this method. Here it is a series of pictures that make up a situation Its advantage is that the presentation phase is controlled by the teacher. The picture strips are always at hand, in the books and the slides can easily be handled Its disadvantage is that ttie pupil does not consider the pictures to represent total verbal behaviour arid is not able to identify with the characters in the storv. He is nnt. able to put himself in the place of the characters in the same way as in the case of the television. On the one hand this can hinder motivation and on the other static pictures cannot semitisize and con textual ize all that a film on TV can. The methodological principles of ttie audio-visual method such as monolingual semantisizing, the oral approach, the exclusion of linguistic analysis exclusively Stimulus-Response learning are rather dogmatic,