The writer sets out theories and techniques for at least three methods of teaching Korean. The audiolingual method, in this account, is a Korean teaching method formed under the influence of behaviorist psychology and structural linguistics. In contrast to grammar-translation, which leaned on written language, it puts more weight on listening and speaking, on the spoken language. Before the 2000s, the account says, grammar-translation and the direct method, then major methods, gradually gave way to the audiolingual method.

Structural linguistics holds that the primary form of language is speech. Because one learns to speak in a spoken language before reading or writing, speech is primary and writing is secondary, and the first aim of teaching becomes the spoken language. Built on structural linguistics and behaviorist psychology as a theory of acquisition, the audiolingual method uses memorization of dialogues, imitation, and repeated pattern practice to draw, in a short time, clear pronunciation work and automatic listening and speaking responses from learners.

Its characteristic, the writer says, is to expect automatic utterance through the repetition of mechanical practice. A communicative method, by contrast, is meant to bring classroom activity close to the most practical communication a Korean learner can manage, to let learners study how to communicate through interaction in the target language, and to offer a chance to attend not only to the language but to the process of learning.

It also ties language activity outside the classroom to learning inside it. Learning to communicate through interaction means stepping away from the audiolingual habit of listening, repeating, and drilling toward fluency, and learning new expressions by taking part in meaningful communication in the target language. Where grammar-translation and the audiolingual method were grammar-centered classes aimed at accurate sentences, the communicative approach is a meaning-centered activity.

It offers new expressions through grammatically natural conversation, lets learners grasp them in that context, and leads them into communication in actual dialogue. Grammar-translation, for its part, overemphasizes reading, translation, and writing, and has the weakness that this does not readily become a learner’s actual ability to speak Korean. Its writing, the account says, placed the aim of foreign-language study on reading and interpreting literary works written in that language.

The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.