2. Second Stage: 1930s - 1970s: the Audio Lingual Period      

1.   Background

In the previous period, Chinese language education developed without intervention from the federal government due to its lack of strategic significance. In this period, the federal government completely changed its non-intervention policy on second language teaching and started to provide strong support for the development of Chinese language education because of China’s emerging geopolitical significance. The need for war drove Chinese language education in the United States and accelerated its development.

The increasing interconnections among countries in the world drove the need for second language education. The United States government attempted to stay out of international affairs through political isolationism in the first period. However, it was not easy, especially when the United States was so powerful in the world. The same goes for linguistic isolationism. When the United States had to deal with countries, regions, cultures, and communities that use other languages, having talents that spoke their languages was essential. In the 1940s, the United States became involved in the Second World War when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, which drove the United States federal government to provide Chinese language education to military personnel who was going to China to fight the Japanese. Higher education institutions such as the Defense Language Institute, Harvard University, Yale University, and Columbia University was commissioned by the United States federal government to undertake the task of providing Chinese language training to military officers, pilots, and information agents.  

The growth of the Chinese-speaking community in the United States played an important role in advancing Chinese language education as well. In 1943, with the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the strong support for Chinese language education in the United States - the Chinese community, had been growing, providing human and financial resources and elevating the status of the Chinese language. Since then, Chinese language education in the United States has been growing.

Funding from the United States federal government made tremendous influence on Chinese language teaching in the United States in this period. After the Second World War, teaching and learning of the Chinese language had not been diminishing. Rather, its importance was seen by the United States government and the society. With the beginning of the Cold War, Chinese language education became critical in the United State’s competition with the Soviet Union. The United States government was the primary source of support for the transformation in second language pedagogy in colleges and universities. With the resources allocated to second language education and the rising population involved in Chinese language teaching and learning, innovation in pedagogy had become increasingly necessary, and even urgent.  

(2)  Pedagogy: the Audio Lingual Method

This period saw the emergence and rising of the Audio Lingual Method, otherwise known as the “Army Method,”^[1] which still has a strong influence in Chinese language teaching in colleges and universities in the United States today. Unlike the Grammar-Translation Method, which viewed language as the medium of learning ancient culture and literature, this method centered on the learning of modern languages. Second language education thus acquired a more independent status as a profession and discipline, and was given more attention and resources from the government and the community.

Born out of the urgent need for war, this method dictated that the very skills that the military personnel were trained for in their Chinese language instruction were speaking and listening. The Audio Lingual Method were adopted by instructors of many modern languages in the United States, and its application in modern Chinese language instruction was said to be established by Mr. George Kennedy at Yale University, a sinologist who grew up in Nanjing, China and received intensive training of the Chinese language. In this method, the teaching of Chinese characters were postponed until when the students were familiar with the sound system and had laid a solid foundation in the spoken language. Therefore, a romanization system called the “Yale System”^[2] was developed in 1943 by Mr. George Kennedy to help students improve their speaking proficiency in the absence of the writing system. Professor Yuen Ren Chao, director of the Harvard military Chinese language program in this period, was also considered a founding member of this method in Chinese language education.

Linguistically, this method is based on structuralism. It believes that language is a system that can be analyzed into the sound, the meaning, and the grammar, and each of them can be further analyzed into smaller units that form larger units through linguistic rules. It supports the study of language in a scientific way. Based on this theory, learning a language means learning its building materials - the pronunciation and vocabulary, and assemble them based on the rules - the grammar. In terms of the relationship between the writing system and verbal speech, structuralism believes that language and the writing system are separate, and the writing system, which came into being after the existence of the spoken language is a symbol system that simply records the spoken language and cannot exist by itself. This theory laid the foundation for the common practice of the Audio Lingual Method: separating the Chinese characters from the spoken Chinese language in the initial stage and giving priority to the spoken language. Pedagogically, unlike the intuitive Grammar-Translation Method, in this era, as pointed out by Moulton (1963),^[3] the innovation and the revolution of foreign language teaching during this period lies in the fact that it is deeply rooted in linguistics - the scientific analysis of the second languages taught, especially those that had not been learned by a large number of people in the United States.

Psychologically, this method is based on behaviorism, which believes that human behaviors are based on repetitive stimulation-response. According to this theory, the development of a habit or training of a skill is achieved through conditioning human behavior and internalization of the conditioning through mechanical practice. A classic example of behaviorism is the experiment of “Pavlov’s dog.”^[4] In this experiment, a dog gets its food when a bell rings and its mouth salivates when it gets the food. After repetitive training, the dog salivates when it hears the bell ring even when there is no food given. In this experiment, the stimulant is the bell ring, which triggers the response of salivation through making the dog associate the sound of the bell ring with food. Similar experiments were modified and conducted on human beings too. The Audio Lingual Method draws on this theory and developed a pedagogy that centers around intensive repetitive drill instruction.  

Pedagogically, this method is obviously much faster than the traditional way of Chinese language learning in China, which is to recite the whole classical texts for the students to internalize the language. Back in ancient times, before 1912 when the Qing Dynasty ended and the last emperor of China was abdicated, some people in China spent their whole life learning to refine their language skills to pass the imperial exam. For soldiers who go to war, the essence is sufficient. This method is also different from the Grammar-Translation method, which aims not at developing students’ abilities to produce their own speech but rather their ability to comprehend another language.

A typical classroom activity involving audio lingual drill instruction often takes the following form: The teacher writes down approximately 10 language structures that students will practice for their session. For each language structure, the instructor asks several questions that will elicit student answers that make use of the designated structures. After a student gives an answer, the teacher will provide feedback and correct any possible errors. The students are then required to repeat the correct language structure. Pronunciation is given priority and foreign accents are not tolerated. These sentences may be repeated individually or as a group. The teacher and the students speak in a speed close or equal to the normal speed of a native Chinese speaker as soon as the student is considered proficient enough to understand it.

2-1 A Chinese class at Yale University for military personnel from the United States Air Force. In this picture, the instructor is teaching the students the traditional Chinese character “讀  dú”, which means “to read, to study”.

This picture vividly demonstrates what an audio lingual Chinese language class looked like in this period. The class size was small, and the instructor was a native speaker of the Chinese language. The classroom was dominated by the instructor so that she could give constant feedback on the results of the students’ drill exercises. The seating arrangement was suitable for drill instruction because the instructor could easily point to any student for individual speaking and feedback. There was no technology use in this classroom except for the blackboard and chalk. In an audio-lingual classroom, drill instruction that focuses on listening and speaking is almost the sole legitimate activity.

Compared to the Grammar-Translation Method, another difference of the Audio-Lingual Method is that it emphasizes efficiency in language learning. This is largely due to the special needs when this method was developed - to help the soldiers to communicate in Chinese-speaking environment for war. When the war broke out, there was only a short time period to train the soldiers, therefore efficiency becomes a central focus. To improve efficiency, speed is a key factor. First, a teacher speaks uses normal speed of a native speaker whenever she can. Second, the tempo of classroom instruction is fast. Intensive instruction is used in an Audio-Lingual classroom, and that is why there are so many exercises in Audio-Lingual textbooks. It is because the instructor has to go through a lot of training with the students within class time, and she then needs a lot of materials for the students to practice the patterns.

(3) Programs and Organizations: the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), Modern Languages Association (MLA) and various colleges and universities

At first, Chinese language education was impeded immediately after the Second World War because of the “anti-communist” and “fear of communism” sentiment^[5]. Both the interest in China and the enrollment of Chinese language courses decreased significantly. This situation lasted until 1958 when the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) was established. In the 1950s, the Cold War began. The United States and the Soviet Union were competing on every level and in all aspects. Education was inevitably one of the most important aspects of the competition. The launch of Sputnik in the Soviet Union spurred panics in the United States and prompted the United States to reflect on its education system and identified science, math, and foreign languages as the three major domains where significant improvement was needed to catch up with the Soviet Union. This act granted the United States government approximately eight million dollars to establish modern foreign language centers in colleges and universities in the United States, including East Asian and Chinese studies centers that offered Chinese language courses. Chinese was one of the critical languages in the NDEA. The United States realized the importance of studying the non-western areas, which were previously neglected because they were uncommon, during the Cold War and readjust their teaching and research to reflect the current trend.

Founded in 1883 by modern language professors, the MLA has been dedicated to the education of modern languages and literature. As a professional organization, MLA had played a pivotal role in advancing language pedagogy and establishing the foreign language education programs for the NDEA in this period.

The inception of the MLA was essentially in agreement with the Audio Lingual Method. The very reason for founding the MLA was that members of the organization were against second language education during the Grammar-Translation period because they believed that people should learn modern languages and use them for real-life communication rather than to learn old languages to read ancient books. In the early 1900s, before the NDEA was established, the MLA had already undergone a project to promote the teaching and learning of modern languages.^[6] To achieve this goal, they started to develop pedagogy to shift the paradigm of the Grammar-Translation Method. Ordinary oral communication between ordinary people had become more important than formal written communication. Therefore, listening and speaking became the emphasis of the new pedagogy. With the advancement of democracy, language use of ordinary people had taken over that of people from the more elite class, such as Ko Kunhua and people who read Latin and Ancient Greek. MLA’s proposals coincided in part with the need of war-time United States federal government in that they both emphasize the practical aspect of modern language skills. Therefore, when the NDEA was established, the federal government sought help from the MLA to establish their foreign language programs. MLA undertook the task and continued their existing effort with federal aid.

As direct partners of the NDEA, colleges and universities with Chinese departments were essential in implementing the Chinese language programs because they were the very few in the United States with the expertise. According to Ralph Hines, director of the International Education Programs Service of the United States Department of Education, before NEDA was passed, there was a lack of expertise and course offerings of “languages spoken by more than three-fourths of the world’s population.”^[7] They built language and area centers with the support from the federal government, who in turn capitalized on existing resources in Chinese language teaching and research by sending military personnel to the centers to receive intensive training in Chinese language.  Chinese language and area centers became a unique vehicle for the Audio Lingual Method and the teaching of modern Chinese in colleges and universities in the United States. The East Asian Studies Department and other area studies programs in the United States today could be traced back to this era and some of them still insist on using the Audio Lingual Method as the primary pedagogy for Chinese language instruction.

In addition to Yale, another important institution of Chinese language education during this period was Harvard University, where Yuen Ren Chao was in charge of its intensive Chinese language courses after the Pearl Harbor Attack in 1941. Chao initiated the transformation from the Grammar-Translation Method to the Audio Lingual Method. His method is called the “Direct Method”^[8] by  Chinese Language educators because he insisted on using Chinese to teach Chinese in classroom instruction instead of relying on translation. This is not only because the program he was in charge of required efficiency in language training,  but also because language was not considered the affiliation of learning Chinese culture and literature anymore. Chinese language education was now the center of attention and was given its due attention.  

An exemplary embodiment of the Audio Lingual Method is the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, otherwise known as “The Army Language School”.^[9] When the United States was set to join the Second World War in 1941, the Fourth U.S. Army Intelligence School was founded in the San Francisco Presidio for secret Japanese language training programs. According to Sun and Shouse (2016),^[10] after the Second World War, possibly due to the realization that  the Nationalist Party was going to fail in the Chinese Civil War, the Army Language School established its Chinese language program. In 1944, the school added 33 sections, two of which were Chinese. In 1946, the school was moved to Monterey California and its name was changed to The Army Language School.  The Army Language School recruited native instructors for Chinese and other more than 30 languages that were considered as having Cold War significance. Various languages are taught in this school with the Audio Lingual Method and advanced technology that revolves around developing students’ oral proficiency has been an integral part of their language instruction.

With government support and the effort of the NEDA, the MLA, and various colleges and universities, Chinese language education in the United States was elevated to a new level. In 1968, the number of universities in the United States that established Chinese courses increased to 108 and the enrollment of Chinese courses reached 5,061.^[11] Students taking Chinese language courses at college level increased from 1,844 in 1960 to 6,208 in 1970.^[12]   

(4) Textbooks: the John DeFrancis Series

In order to rapidly improve the students’ speaking ability, a textbook series based on the Audio Lingual Method was written by Dr. John DeFrancis, a Chinese language instructor at Yale University, and was published in 1945. This series was one of the representatives of this period and had been influential in Chinese language education in the United States for decades. They were still used by some colleges and universities in the United States in the early 2000s.^[13] The books in this series include Beginning Chinese, Intermediate Chinese, and Advanced Chinese. This series had many distinctive characteristics of the Audio Lingual Method. First, there were romanization versions and Chinese character versions of this series of textbooks. The separation of romanization and Chinese characters was the result of the emphasis on the spoken language of the Audio-Lingual Method. Acquisition of the writing system was suspended until a solid foundation of the spoken language was laid.

2-2  Page 115 of Beginning Chinese by John De Francis, an excerpt of Lesson 26, “Distance and Separation.” All of the Chinese text on the left  is written in Yale Romanization and the English translation is on the right.^[14]

Take the Beginning Chinese romanization version textbook as an example. This book does not have a single Chinese character in it at all. All the Chinese language in this book is written in Yale Romanization. For instance, the page above is an excerpt of Lesson 26. There are two columns on the page：the left is the Chinese text written in Yale Romanization, and the right is the English translation of the text. This is representative of the format of the texts in this book. It is based on structuralism, which considers the spoken language and written language as separate systems and the former more important than the latter. However, when Saussure, the founder of structuralism, drew the conclusion, he admitted that it was based on European languages and could not explain languages such as Chinese. When applying the structuralist Audio Lingual Method to a language very different from the European languages, problems would occur. The connections between the writing system of the Chinese language and the language per se, if they could be separated, according to structuralism, is closer than the European languages, whose writing systems are composed of simple abstract letters that themselves only represent certain sounds in the system. Chinese characters are different: they are composed of strokes, which are abstract lines and curves that are transformed from several thousand years of history.    

Second, this book embodies the analytical characteristic of structuralism. After each text, an exhaustive list of new vocabulary words appearing in the text are listed. There is a Notes section that explains the grammar points appearing in each text. The structuralist Audio Lingual Method believes that if students can understand the words, or the building materials of a language, the distinctive structures, or the frames of a language, and the grammar rules, students can understand the language and make their own speech by assembling these components according to the rules and structures.

This method works especially well for beginners and intermediate level students, who may need more rules to navigate their acquisition of an unknown linguistic system. In view of the low interest in Chinese language and foreign language learning overall in the first period, most of the students of this era had low or no proficiency in Chinese language. Therefore this method worked well for the students of that time. In the introduction of the book, John Francis explains the essence of the book - analysis and repetition. The purpose of analysis is to help students understand the components, structure, and mechanism of the Chinese language so that the new language is not a monolithic plate to them, who have almost no prior knowledge or experience with the language. Language cut into pieces is easier for students at this stage to digest, which agrees with human cognitive development. Another advantage of making analysis one of the learning principles of the book is that students can learn explicitly what the rules of the language are.  For beginners, acquiring a new system of symbols can be a daunting task because they have very little knowledge of how the linguistic system works and simple and clear rules will help them better navigate the system by themselves and learn more actively, especially when they need to learn it in an expedited way because of an emergency.

An essential part of this book is the drilling exercises, which are representative of the Audio Lingual Method and its focus on listening and speaking. The purpose of such exercises is to help students internalize the structures and words they have learned in the text through mechanical listening and speaking stimulant-responses activities. There are different kinds of drill exercises in this book. Modeling drill intends students to imitate the sentences that contain the structures covered in the text so that they can internalize the forms, meanings, and pronunciations of the Chinese language; questions and answers drilling exercises helps students learn different forms of sentences such as statements and questions, and how they are connected in real conversations. Substitution tables provide alternative components for the questions and answers drilling exercises and the student can replace certain components in the same structures with different words in the table. All the words in the tables are carefully selected to ensure that they fit in the designated sentences. Regardless of the types of the drilling exercises, students are expected to say the sentences out fluently without having to think about the structures and the components of the sentences through doing such exercises.

2-4  Page 8 of Beginning Chinese, it introduces how to use the substitute table for drilling exercises in this book.

The emphasis on analytical linguistic patterns and the mechanical internalization of such patterns is most clearly demonstrated in a particular kind of drilling exercise in this book called the “pyramid^[15]” exercise. It is basically using structuralist analysis to cut sample sentences into smaller units and model to the students how to assemble the dissected components to form a complete sentence. The student repeats after the teacher when the teacher says a unit on a level of the pyramid. As new components are added to the components on the previous level to form larger units, the student’s utterance gets longer and longer. In the end, the student says a full sentence assembled from the components according to grammar rules. In this way, the student learns the grammar and vocabulary directly through speaking a sentence. There is no translation activity involved in this process. That is why  the Audio-Lingual Method is also known as the Direct Method in the Chinese language education community because the student directly uses the target language to learn, instead of using the first language as an intermediary to approach the target language like the Grammar - Translation Method.

2-5  Page 51 of Beginning Chinese. The Drill VII Sentence Pyramid exercise visually resembles the shape of a pyramid.

Drill VII “Sentence Pyramid” on Page 51 of Beginning Chinese demonstrates how this exercise works. It starts with the prepositional phrase that indicates location of a long sentence, and builds upon the phrase little by little until a grammatically correct sentence is formed. The literal word-for-word English translation of the pyramid is as follows:

1. On top
2. The book on top
3. The book on table top
4. Mr.’s book on table top
5. Ma Mr. ’s book on table top
6. Ma Mr. buy of book on table top
7. Ma Mr. want buy of book on table top
8. Ma Mr. want buy of book on that table top
9. Ma Mr. want buy of book on that big table top
10. Ma Mr. want buy of that book on that very big table top
11. Ma Mr. want to buy of that book also on that very big table top
12. Ma Mr. want to buy of that book now also on that very big table top
13. Ma Mr. want to buy of that book now also on that very big table top?^[16]

2-6  Page 158 of Character Text for Beginning Chinese. This picture shows some pyramid drilling exercises written in Chinese characters.

The other important principle of this book is repetition. Only by knowing and understanding the rules is not going to lead to fluent speaking, because rules are like a crutch for beginners, and the purpose of having rules is to ultimately get rid of them. Native speakers don’t need the explicit rules, which are generalized from natural languages, to speak the language properly.  In the introduction, the author says that repetition is “the only way” to achieve “a firm, quick and sensitive understanding” “without stopping to reason”. It shows that the concept of communication, according to the Audio Lingual Method, is to automatically comprehend and produce authentic target language through automation of the correct structures and answers. The author believes that students will achieve fluency through behavioristic training of correctly analyzed structures and language rules. The book also emphasizes on the importance of repetition by stating that students should read through the drilling exercises again and again. It says that students should not refer to the notes that explain the grammar too much because the focus is for students to practice speaking the sentences that contain the structures and vocabulary.

Translation exercises in this book, compared to those in the Grammar-Translation Method, are only part of the tasks that aim to improve the students’ oral communication proficiency - it is not the center of Chinese language learning anymore. This is because in the Grammar-Translation Method, comprehension is at the center of language learning. However, when it comes to the direct Audio-Lingual Method, the studying of form becomes as important as that of meaning. For example, there are very detailed explanations on the sound system and pronunciation of Chinese, such as the tones, initials, finals, and so on in this book. This tradition of Chinese textbooks for second language learners continues to this day. This is a reaction of the Grammar-Translation method, which does not put emphasis on pronunciation and the oral part of second language learning because of the learning goal of the method. In the Audio Lingual Method, translation exercises give students the opportunity to become sensitive to the differences and similarities between Chinese and English.

In addition, translation exercises are complementary to drilling exercises. When doing translation exercises, the student has to pay attention to various aspects of the differences between the two languages. Translation exercises also help students to understand the meaning of the Chinese language whereas drilling exercises are more helpful in learning the form of the language. Therefore, translation is more comprehensive and holistic and less mechanical than drilling exercises that focus more on a certain part and one pattern at a time. However, sometimes it requires some translation skills to work on these exercises and students may not have developed these skills yet.

As an exemplar Audio Lingual Chinese textbook, Beginning Chinese firmly believes the importance of speaking. In the introduction, the author says “The only sound way to study a modern language is to begin by speaking”.^[17]  Because the Audio-Lingual Method puts an emphasis on the spoken language, native speakers of the target language are valued in the instruction. Because the Madarin taught in this book, like in other textbooks, is based on the Beijing dialect in China, the texts in this textbook were reviewed by native speakers of the Beijing dialect and it suggests that learners of this book should try to study with a Chinese teacher “whose native dialect is Peakingnese” to ensure the most authentic language input. The emphasis of the spoken Chinese language is also demonstrated in the statement “Our lessons are based on the actual everyday language.”

Another important aspect of Chinese language learning is Chinese characters. Traditionally,  Chinese characters were thought of as the basic analytical unit of the Chinese language. Although the Audio Lingual Method generally does not place emphasis on the writing system, Chinese characters are too unique to ignore. Due to the single-syllable characteristic of the Chinese language, there were a raft of homonyms in the language and Chinese characters are very effective in distinguishing one from another. For example, when Chinese people introduce their names, they usually specify which characters are in their names so the listener would understand which words they are referring to.

The debate about whether to teach speaking first or teach speaking and writing Chinese characters together has been on-going in Chinese language education. Until now, every Chinese language textbook and pedagogy has to deal with this issue. Although an audio-lingual textbook, the John DeFrancis series does not abandon the Chinese characters at all. On the contrary, the book does an excellent job of teaching Chinese characters. From an acquisition point of view, Chinese characters do need to be taught systematically. Because, contrary to the impression of students who have not yet learned how to write them, Chinese characters are systematically structured - strokes, and their organizing principles, stroke orders. This page vividly and creatively demonstrates how to write Chinese characters analytically. The numbers mark the stroke orders - some go first, while others should start when other strokes are completed. Some radicals represent the meaning of the character and the sound part that represent the sound of the characters. Chinese characters are intimately interconnected with the Chinese language and cannot separate from the Chinese language. Even if for accelerated learning, Chinese characters are temporarily set aside, in the long run, they are essential for a student’s overall Chinese language proficiency.

2-8 Page 392 from the Beginning Chinese Character Textbook^[18] 

(5)  Textbooks: Mandarin Primer Chao, Yuen Ren.

Back in China, in 1919, the Vernacular Movement improved the status of the spoken Chinese language. In the United States, Yuen Ren Chao is considered by some as initiating the vernacular movement in the United States in Chinese language education. Ever since his involvement in research and teaching of Chinese to second language users, spoken Chinese had acquired its mainstream status in Chinese language education in colleges and universities in the United States. The traditional Grammar-Translation Method, which aimed only to improve students’ reading knowledge of a language, was fundamentally transformed. To achieve the goal of communicating successfully with native speakers of Chinese, using “authentic spoken Chinese”^[19]materials and an emphasis on spoken Chinese had become the distinctive characteristics of the Audio Lingual Method. Mandarin Primer, a textbook based on Yuen Ren Chao’s work for teaching the intensive Chinese language course at Harvard in the 1940s, was the representative of the characteristics of his teaching methodology.

2-9  Cover of Mandarin Primer by Yuen Ren Chao^[20]

This  textbook is full of authentic spoken Chinese language materials based on the Beijing dialect, which is the mandarin spoken today in China. The topics are all closely related to the daily lives of ordinary people. For example, the following audio excerpts from the book vividly demonstrates what common Chinese people say when visiting a doctor: (audio file)^[21]

There are many expressions that are extremely natural and colloquial in this excerpt. Sentence patterns commonly used in spoken Chinese, such as “verb 倒是还 (dàoshi hái) verb (Although…, it is still...)” “verb 不惯(bú guàn not used to...)” ”所谓... (suǒwèi,  so-called)”“连...也(lián...yě, even something...)””adj.得要命(extremely)”, are still key language points in Chinese language textbooks nowadays. A native speaker of Chinese can hardly hear anything harsh to the ear. Although it was written by a linguist, it was de facto authentic text that language teachers are talking about today. Compared to Ko Kunhua’s highly literary, formal, and engineered poems written in classical Chinese describing his admiration for political power, this text was indeed a breakthrough in Chinese language teaching.  

The common linguistic patterns demonstrate the structuralist characteristic of the Audio Lingual Method. The patterns capable of producing a variety of sentences were analyzed out of the continued ordinary speech of the Chinese language and have become essential for the Audio Lingual Method. Before the advent of the Audio Lingual Method, the vernacular Chinese language was not analyzed to teach L2 learners. Because native speakers naturally spoke the language, there was no need to analyze it. In other words, the vernacular Chinese language had become essentialized into a system of rules and an object of scientific study through such analysis. Phonetically, this textbook taught students the analyzed sounds with the alphabetical systems, of which native speakers were not intuitively aware. Because the Audio Lingual Method aimed at training second-language speakers who could communicate with native speakers of the target language, it had to give the learners some useful tools they could use to produce their speech in real contexts. The tools, in this case, were patterns whose their meanings and rules were abstracted from daily speech. Such a systematic scientific study helped the linguists and language teachers understand what to teach; it also provided the students with a clearer picture of what to learn about the spoken Chinese language to fulfill their goals.

According to the Audio Lingual Method, ideally, second language speakers could use the new language to communicate by filling the patterns with words they have learned. Structuralist analysis has helped the Audio Lingual Method build a productive linguistic model. Teaching Chinese as a second language thus became distinctly different from the Grammar - Translation Method. The Chinese language that students learned in an audio-lingual textbook was not just classics designated by authorities in China that every student could only read and understand. It had become a useful tool that students could use to make their utterance based on the language materials and rules they learned. It was by no means perfect but was still a breakthrough. This pedagogy represented infinite possibilities of creation for people who did not know much about the language. It redefined Chinese, a language burdened with archaic deep-rooted traditions, and excessive elitism that prevented ordinary people from learning it. At that time, even native speakers who received formal education could only learn it through memorization, and there was little space for their creation.

Now that modern language science had essentialized Chinese vernacular language into a scientifically studied system, intensive repetitive drilling exercises are thus developed to help learners internalize its components. This method emphasizes on behavioristic stimulus and response. Students learn a second language through repeated imitation and error correction to achieve their language proficiency. The role of the teachers, who are native speakers of the second language taught in this pedagogy, is a trainer who provides well-prepared linguistically sound examples and questions for students to imitate and answer. Ideally, students are moving to the next exercise when they are error-free when speaking the sentence they are practicing. This process is repeated intensively to ensure expedited language learning. Compare and comparison accurately describes the students' learning process in the audio-lingual classroom. Their primary focus is to become as similar to the native speakers as possible.

(6) Classroom Instruction: Defense Language Institute (DLI)

As a higher education institution where the Audio Lingual Method still prevails, the Defense Language Institute is a representative example of the pedagogy. The following videos from the historical record of DLI show how classroom instruction of the method works.  (video file) ^[22] 

The video demonstrates the emphasis on the input of authentic spoken Chinese of the Audio Lingual Method. Employing various natives speakers to teach second language learners ensured maximum direct exposure to authentic language in real-time interactions. Because this method is based on behavioristic stimulus-response, the stimulus, or the input, in this case, must be of high quality, or the students’ response would be problematic too.  

Besides, it is essential to consider the status of the Chinese vernacular taught in the United States - a variant deemed to be used by people of lower social class in informal occasions. Yet, it was this Chinese variant that was taught with the methodology established under the guidance of advanced modern linguistic theories in colleges and universities in the United States. The emphasis on developing oral skills of vernacular Chinese thus has fundamental historical significance. It shifted Chinese language education in the United States from the perspectives of elites like Ko Kunhua and Samuel Williams, who represented thoughts in feudalistic hierarchical society in China, to a democratic position that emphasizes on the people.  According to Vygotsky, language is the medium for people to understand the world.^[23] A language thus contains the world views and cultures of the native speakers. Speaking the language of ordinary people from another culture is an excellent way of understanding the world views and cultures of the speakers. This shift laid a solid foundation for the popularity of Chinese language learning and the pedagogy innovation of Chinese language education in colleges and universities in the next decades in the United States.    

(Video clip 2)

This video demonstrates the high intensity of repetitive drilling, shown in the long hours of instruction dominated by the student's oral practice in DLI Chinese classes. It ensures maximum exposure and immersive input of the Chinese language so that the student can get used to the new language they are learning and try their best to transform what they learn to actual oral speeches. Repetitive drill ensures that the student internalizes the authentic language materials and productive patterns in the authentic language materials and form stimulus responses. The instructor monitors the student's speech and corrects errors through a comparison between the student's language and the instructor's modeling or the feedback from the instructor.

The layout of an audio lingual classroom in this period was designed to facilitate the pedagogy. A typical DLI classroom in the 1950s was sufficient to accommodate 5 to 10 students sitting. Instructors give intense and repetitive drilling exercises to individuals in the classroom. Meanwhile, students sit in the classroom and wait for the instructor to speak in his/her own native language and then repeat what the instructor says together or individually. The instructor writes grammatical structures on the blackboard for practice and asks students questions that intend to elicit answers containing the grammatical structure. When students answer the questions, the instructor gives them feedback by correcting their errors in pronunciation, grammar, lexicon, and so on. Then the students should repeat the correct answers. At DLI in this period, students stayed in such a classroom for six hours during the day, and practice for another three hours with technological device in the evening. ^[24]

Technology use in this period also facilitated the Audio Lingual Method. Technological aids in this period include records and language labs. Yuen Ren Chao first incorporated vinyl records, a fairly new invention at the time, in Chinese language education in the United States. It was a crucial breakthrough because an advanced technology was applied to a skill traditionally ignored in second language education. The language lab at DLI, as described in the video, was state-of-the-art at the time. In the language lab, the instructor is still the center of the classroom and has the most authority. The equipment in the lab facilitates compare and comparison of the audio lingual instruction on a large scale. The instructor perform the same drilling instructions and transform part of what she does in the classroom to technology.

The Audio-Lingual Method had been evolving and modified in this period since its inception in Yale, Harvard, and the Defense Language Institute. Exploration of pedagogy innovation based on the Audio - Lingual Method was also conducted in this period. In the 1950s, the Korean War broke out. The Institute of Far Eastern Languages at Yale University undertook the task of training soldiers from the United States Air Force to speak Korean and Chinese. The Audio Lingual Method was improved and refined at this stage^[25]. In 1966, Middlebury College, known for its excellent language education, combined intensive language instruction inherited from the Audio-Lingual Method with classroom management, program management, and language assessment. This program had become the most influential one in the United States and still influences Chinese language teaching in higher education institutions in the United States.

Overall, the Audio Lingual Method was a breakthrough of Chinese language education in the United States. It represents the formation of scientific research and systematic methodology of Chinese language education, a step further for it to become a profession and an independent discipline. With the support from the United States federal government and higher education, the status of Chinese language education was elevated because of its strong association with national security. Along with it, the Chinese vernacular took center stage in Chinese language education, disrupting the elite and old tradition set up by the Grammar-Translation Method and pre-modern Chinese society. Repetitive drilling of productive linguistic structures also made Chinese language teaching and learning more efficient. However, because this pedagogy was born out of a very narrow purposes and relies heavily on funding sources for the single purpose, it would face considerable challenges in the new era, which would propel the innovation of Chinese language pedagogy in the next few decades.