The natural approach

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Tracy Terrell, a Californian education theorist, along with Stephen Krashen, a linguist at the University of Southern California, developed a new method of language teaching, which aims to foster the natural acquisition of a language. It is based on the language acquisition theory, which was developed by Krashen himself.

This kind of approach was originally developed in 1977 by Terrell, whose aim was to create a new teaching method, in which language plays an important role, by putting the emphasis on comprehension and communication. According to Krashen and Terrell, the main problem of the other methods is that they focus on the grammatical component, rather than focusing on the nature of language itself. In fact, in the natural approach language learning is a reproduction of how humans naturally acquire language. This method rejects earlier methods such as the audio-lingual method and the situational language teaching approach, which Krashen and Terrell believe were not based on “actual theories of language acquisition but theories of the structure of language.

The native language should not be used in the classroom: the students should be exposed to a lot of vocabulary and many activities should be carried out. The natural approach was a method for beginners, based on observation and interpretation on how a person acquires his or her first language. Moreover, its aim is to help students immediately. It rejects the formal organization of language: in fact, it is not based on grammar, but it is based on communication. It also emphasizes comprehensible and meaningful practice activities, rather than the production of grammatically perfect sentences. This method is based on the use of language in communicative situations without recourse to the native language and without any reference to grammatical analysis. The natural approach is based on the principles of a naturalistic language learning process, especially when dealing with children. As previously mentioned, the central component of language is not grammar, but communication: in fact language is viewed as a vehicle for communicating meanings and messages.