The natural approach

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 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.

The natural approach was strikingly different from the mainstream approach in the United States in the 1970s and early 1980s, the audio lingual method While the audio-lingual method prized drilling and error correction, these things disappeared almost entirely from the natural approach. Terrell and Krashen themselves characterized the natural approach as a "traditional" method. And contrasted it with grammar-based approaches, which they characterized as new inventions that had "misled" teachers.

The aim of the natural approach is to develop communicative skill and it is primarily intended to be used with beginning learners. It is presented as a set of principles that can apply to a wide range of learners and teaching situations, and concrete objectives depend on the specific context in which it is used. Terrell outlines three basic principles of the approach:

• "Focus of instruction is on communication rather than its form."
• "Speech production comes slowly and is never forced.
• "Early speech goes through natural stages (yes or no response, one- word answers, lists of words, short phrases, complete sentences.)"

Krashen outlined five hypotheses in his model:

1. The acquisition-learning hypothesis.
2. The monitor hypothesis.
3. The input hypothesis.
4. The natural order hypothesis.
5. The affective filter hypothesis.

Teaching according to the Natural Approach involves the following principles:

• Teaching according to the Natural approach focuses on communicative abilities.
• One of its objectives is to help beginners become intermediate.
• Vocabulary is considered prior to synthactic structures.
• A lot of comprehensible input must be provided.
• Use of visual aids to help comprehension.
• Focus is on listening and reading. Speaking emerges later.
• Reducing the high affective filter by
• focusing on meaningful communication rather than on form.
• prividing interesting comprehensible input
• The technique used in this approach are often borrowed from other methods and adapted to meet the requirement of the approach.