Teaching at Ingles Individual 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 syntactic structures.
- A lot of comprehensible input must be provided.
- Use of visual aids to help comprehension.
- The focus is on listening and reading. Speaking emerges later.
- Reducing the high affective filter by
- focusing on meaningful communication rather than on form.
- providing interesting comprehensible input
- The technique used in this approach are often borrowed from other methods and adapted to meet the requirement of the approach. These include:
- Total, Physical Response command drills
- The Direct Method activities mime, gestures and context are used to elicit questions, and answers.
- Communicative Language Teaching group work activities where learners share information to complete a task.
Conclusion
The Natural Approach belongs to a tradition of language acquisition where the naturalistic features of L1 acquisition are utilized in the L2 acquisition. It is an approach that draws a variety of techniques from other methods and approaches to reach this goal which is one of its advantages. But the originality of this approach does not lie in these techniques but on the emphasis on activities based on comprehensible input and meaningful communication rather than on only grammatical mastery of language.
References:
Richards, J. C. & Rogers, T. S. (1986). Approaches and methods in language teaching: A description and analysis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Brown, H. D. (2000). Principles of language learning and teaching (4th ed.). New York
Por: Teacher César