THE NATURAL APPROACH

Definition:
The Natural Approach, is a method of foreign language teaching which aims to apply the principles
of natural language acquisition into a classroom.
Naming:
The use of the term, ”Natural Approach’ rather than ‘Method’ signifies the development of a change
towards ‘approach’ from a “method” which implies a particular set of features to be followed,
almost as to ‘approach’ which starts from some basic principles developed in the design and
practice in teaching and learning.
Based On:-

Background:
The natural approach was originally created in 1977 by Terrell, a Spanish teacher in California, who
wished to develop a style of teaching based on the findings of naturalistic studies of second-
language acquisition. After the original formulation, Terrell worked with Krashen to further develop
the theoretical aspects of the method. Terrell and Krashen published the results of their
collaboration in the 1983 book The Natural Approach.
Features
 It focuses on communicative abilities because the basic purpose of language is to
communicate and deliver your ideas successfully.

 One of its objectives is to help beginners become intermediate.

 Vocabulary is initially considered than syntactic structures or grammatical structures of

language.

 A lot of comprehensible data must be provided by the teachers.

 Natural sequence of language learning has been followed.

 It gives more importance to the situational environment so the learners are asked to respond
in that particular way.

 Aims at providing the environment same as that of a infant has while acquiring his mother
tongue in order to change the learning into acquisition.

 Learners are not informed about their minor mistakes because in this way a sort of hurdle or
hesitation has been occurred in their learning proficiency, unless errors interfere with
communication.
  This approach aims at learning the target language under the environment of subconscious
state of mind.

 Lessons in the natural approach focus on understanding messages in the target language, and
place little or no importance on error correction, drilling or on conscious learning of grammar
rules.

 Terrel aim is to make the vocabulary stick in students' long term memory, a process which he
calls Binding. Terrell sees some techniques as more binding than others; for example, the use
of gestures or actions, is seen to be more binding than the use of translation.
Merits
 Motivation must be maximum and anxiety should be zero, in this way a comfortable and
mentally relaxed environment is given to the learners so that the learners do not feel
overwhelmed by anxiety.

 Students are allowed to talk as much as they can and as long as they can.

 Mistakes are not pointed out so students don’t feel embarrassed rather they always remain
confident that they are correct.

 Use of visual aids helps in better understanding.

Demerits
 Its is slow method because majority of the time is dedicated to listening skill during the silent
phase.

 The same environmental conditions cannot be applied to an adult. An adult cannot

experience the same situation because a child is born with a clean slate i.e “Tabula Rasa”
while on the other hand an adult mind is not identical as that of a mind of a child because his
psyche has already been developed.

 Little Emphasis given to grammar analaysis as compared to that of a linguistic competence

and vocabulary.

Syllabus and Lesson

A typical natural approach lesson at elementary to intermediate level might go something like this:

1. The teacher shows a set of pictures of, say, food and drink, repeating the word that goes with
each with one; the students simply watch and listen.
2. The pictures are displayed around the room, and the students are asked to point at the
appropriate picture when the teacher names it.
3. The students listen to a tape of a teacher describing what they habitually eat at different
meals; the students tick the items they hear on a worksheet.
 4. The students are then given a gapped transcript of the previous listening activity, and they fill
in the gaps from memory, before listening again to check.
5. The students, in pairs, take turns to read aloud the transcript to one another.
6. The students, still in their pairs, tell each other what they typically eat, using the transcript as
a model.
7. They repeat the task with another partner, this time without referring to the model.

Stages of Natural Approach:

 Silent Phase:- In an initial stages learners make use of the gestures and they could give non-
verbal answers to their teachers.
The first stage in the Natural Approach is essentially a silent phase, where nothing seems to
be happening. Children have this stage when they’re not really talking. At all. Teachers are
essentially getting nothing. No utterance, just a blank stare. Silence.

Actually, so many things are happening. They’re listening. Picking up on meanings. Reading
context clues. Interpreting and making guesses on what is being said. Making mistakes and honing
their guesses.

 One Word Answer and Comprehension:- And when babies start uttering their first words,
their first phrases, their first simple sentences, the focus is still on comprehension. But this
time, the crux of the issue is “Are you being understood by the other person?” (Again, you
don’t need perfect grammar for this.)

 Three to two word answers:- Bothering with correct grammar comes late in the acquisition
stage. In the Natural Approach, the early stages are replete with grammatically incorrect
communication that are not even really implicitly corrected. Like when a child says, “I
drinks,”. But that child is slowly getting fluent with his first language. Same thing is expected
from the learner as well.
 Short answers:- so that the meaning is conveyed but their sentences lack proper
grammatical structure and syntax. Learners use short sentences.

 Fluency: Students are expected to give a complex, compound, structured an lengthy

answers. This progress to fluency continues as more exposure to the language happens.

Semblance With Other Methods:

The technique used in this approach are often borrowed from other methods and adapted to meet the
requirement of this approach. These include:

 Total Physical Response: Command activities, drills and the binding techniques.

 The Direct Method: follow teachers pronounciation, gestures. Context are used to deduce
questions, and answers. Vocabulary is given importance.

 Communicative Language Teaching: Group activities where learners work together share
knowledge and information to complete a task.

 It is also not easily possible in public school like TPR, DM and ALM.
Distinguishes From Others:

What really distinguishes the Natural approach from other methods and approaches are its
foundation which concerns the use of language and the importance of vocabulary. This means that
language acquisition cannot take place unless the acquirer understands messages in the target
language and has developed sufficient vocabulary inventory. In fact, it should be easier to
reconstruct a message containing just vocabulary items than one containing just the grammatical
structures.

Time period is not fixed in this period in this way it differs from the other method except Total
Physical Response (TPR).
It is not memory based method, and neither it teaches language through grammar hence it differs
from GTM.
Medium of learning is a target language, hence differs from GTM, TPR.
While the audio-lingual method prized drilling and error correction, these things are not included in
the natural approach.
Here students are the only focus hence in this way it differs from all other methods.
Richard and Rodgers compare Natural Approach with Natural Method in such a way that they say
that like Direct method, the Natural Approach is

“believed to conform to the naturalistic principles found in second language acquisition.

Unlike the direct method, however, it places less emphasis on teacher monologues, direct
repeation, and formal questions and answers, and less focus on accurate production of target
language sentences” (Richards and Rodgers, 1986).
Theory of Learning :
Krashen’s Language Acquisition Theory  The NA “is based on an empirically grounded theory of
second language acquisition, which has been supported by a large number of scientific studies in a
wide variety of language acquisition and learning contexts” (Krashen & Terrell, 1983)