Domestication of Audiolingualism in ELT in China: From the Perspective of Cultural Accommodation
Audio Lingual Method (ALM) or Audiolingualism is a language teaching methodology introduced in the 1950s in the western world. It was later domesticated in a painless way in Chinese foreign language pedagogy in contrast to the Chinese cultural resistance to Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in China. The paper explores why Audiolingualism is not inimical to the Chinese culture of learning while CLT seems to have encountered cultural resistance, although both approaches are of foreign origin. By putting a number of issues under scrutiny, the paper contends that the Chinese adoption of ALM, and coolness towards CLT, had deep roots in traditional Chinese culture and philosophy of education.