The Natural Approach

“The essence of language is meaning. Vocabulary not grammar is the heart of language.”

Kim FaustoGlorimar Piris

Wandallys Ramos

The Natural Approach

BackgroundThe Natural Approach was proposed in 1977 by Tracy Terrell, a teacher of Spanish at the University of California, and Stephen Krashen, an applied linguist at the University of Southern California.

Terrell and Krashen try to provide a detailed theoretical rationale for the Natural Approach. In 1983, their joint effort came out in a book The Natural Approach: Language Acquisition in the Classroom, which states the principles and practices of the Natural Approach.

The term “natural” indicates that the principles underlying the approach conform to the principles of naturalistic language learning in young children.

Tenets•Language acquisition is different from language learning and language acquisition is the only way competence in a second language occurs.

•Conscious learning operates only as a monitor or editor that checks or repairs the output of what has been acquired.

•Grammatical structures are acquired in a predictable order and it does little good to try to learn them in another order.

•People acquire language best from messages that are just slightly beyond their current competence.

•The learner's emotional state can act as a filter that impedes or blocks input necessary to acquisition.

Objectives

The Natural Approach "is for beginners and is designed to help them become intermediates."

•It has the expectation that students will be able to function adequately in the target situation.

•They will understand the speaker of the target language (perhaps with requests for clarification), and will be able to convey (in a non-insulting manner) their requests and ideas.

•They should be able to make the meaning clear but not necessarily be accurate in all details of grammar.

Theories of Learning Krashen bases the Natural Approach on a number of theories of learning… 

The Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis

Krashen makes a distinction between acquisition and learning.

Acquisition is developing competence by using language for real communication. Speakers are not concerned with language form, but with meaning.

Learning refers to formal knowledge of a language. It is the process in which conscious rules about a language are developed.

The Monitor Hypothesis

The Natural Order Hypothesis

(1)People acquire the rules of language in a predictable order.

(2)No matter which rules are taught first which are taught later, the learners would always acquire the rules in a certain order.

The Input Hypothesis

(1)People acquire language by understanding messages or receiving comprehensible input.

(2)People acquire language best by understanding input that is slightly beyond their current level of competence.

(3)The ability to speak fluently cannot be taught directly; rather, it "emerges" independently in time, after the acquirer has built up linguistic competence by understanding input.

The Affective Filter Hypothesis

(1) Motivation. Learners with high motivation generally do better.

(2) Self-confidence. Learners with self-confidence and a good self-image tend to be more successful.

(3) Anxiety. Low personal anxiety and low classroom anxiety are more conducive to second language acquisition.

Stages of Language Acquisition

Preproduction (Silent Period) Students at this stage exposed to English and are just beginning to

learn the language.

The teacher does about 90% or more of the talking, and the ELL students should listen and respond non-verbally.

The teacher’s speech includes lots of pantomime, body language, facial expressions, and gestures.

The teacher models rather than just verbally explain tasks and skills, and use lots of pictures and real objects.

The teacher checks comprehension through asking them to respond non-verbally.

Students vocabulary includes approximately 500 receptive words and begin to develop “Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills”

Early Production

Students begin to produce some language along with the same type of non-verbal responses that they depended on in level 1.

The types of questions that students can answer at this level are yes/no, “what, who or where?” “either/or” questions.

Teachers uses simplified language and avoids idioms and uncommon vocabulary.

Peer interaction is key to provide learners with better opportunities to understand the content as well as develop their language.

About 1,000 words form their receptive vocabulary, and as at any other level, about 10% of their vocabulary is expressive.

Speech Emergence Questions they are now able to answer include “how” and “why,”

which require fairly complex responses.

Learners at this stage can participate in a variety of teaching strategies.

The teacher’s role is to provide nonverbal input, be mindful of their own oral, written communication and unusual vocabulary, frequently check for comprehension; and increase the number of non-verbal cues.

Whenever communication breaks down, the teacher employs the same strategies as those used in the beginning stages.

Students’ use phrases and sentences, and their receptive vocabulary grows to nearly 7,000 words.

Intermediate Fluency Learners have gone beyond speaking in phrases and simple

sentences to being able to engage in extended discourse.

Learners can answer complex questions that require them to synthesize and evaluate information.

They can participate in essay writing, complex problem solving, researching and supporting their positions, and critiquing and analyzing literature.

Learners demonstrate achievement of a learning objective through creating diagrams, bulleted lists, and other less language dependent means .

Students at this level are still in the process of learning academic English and still require language support.

Acquisition ActivitiesActivities for the Natural Approach are divided into four groups: affective-humanistic, problem-solving, games, and content.

Affective-humanistic

These types of activities attempt to involve students’ feelings, opinions, desires, reactions, ideas, and experiences.

Open dialogues, interviews, reference ranking, personal charts and tables, supplying personal information, imagination, description, etc are often used to involve students in communicating information about themselves.

Problem-Solving

These activities are those in which the students’ attention is focused on finding a correct answer to a question, a problem or a situation.

Games

Playing games is an important experience in the acquisition process. Games can take many forms and there are many different sorts of elements which make up a game activity.

In a Natural Approach classroom, the primary focus of any particular game is on words, discussion, action, contest, problem-solving, and guess. And most games exhibit a combination of these elements.

Content These activities are the ones whose purposes is for the students to learn something new other than language. They include slide shows, panels, individual reports and presentations, “show and tell ” activities, music, film scripts, TV reports, news broadcasts, guest lectures, native speaker visitors, reading and discussions about any sort of the target language and culture.

Content activities provide comprehensible input in a situation in which the students’ attention is on the message and not on form. Many of these activities are done in groups.

Roles

Learner’s Role1. Provide information about their specific goals so that

acquisition activities can focus on the topics and situations most relevant to their needs.

2. Take an active role in ensuring comprehensible input.

3. Decide when to start producing speech and when to upgrade it.

4. Decide, with the teacher, the relative amount of time to be devoted to them and perhaps even complete and correct them independently.

Teacher’s Role1. The teacher is the primary source of comprehensible

input in the target language.

2. The Natural Approach teacher creates a classroom atmosphere that is interesting, friendly, and in which there is a low affective filter for learning.

3. The teacher must choose and orchestrate a rich mix of class room activities, involving a variety of group sizes, content, and contexts.

4. The Natural Approach teacher has a particular responsibility to communicate clearly and compellingly to students.

Role of Instructional Materials

The primary role of materials in the Natural Approach is to promote comprehension and communication. These materials come from the world of realia rather than from textbooks. Most materials will come in the form of:

•Pictures and other visual aids

•Reading components such as schedules, brochures, advertisements, maps, and books at levels appropriate to the students.

•Games

In conclusion…

Advantages• The classroom is a practical source of comprehensible input in the

target language for beginning students.

• The teacher creates a speech which will enable students to interact using the target language.

• Students are not to respond in the target language immediately.

• Students interact in meaningful situations with other students at or near their own level of competence.

• The teacher is aware of the specific vocabulary needs of the students and can concentrate on appropriate and useful domains.

DisadvantagesThe Natural Approach belongs to a tradition of

language acquisition where the naturalistic features of L1 acquisition are utilized in L2 acquisition.

It is an approach that draws a variety of techniques from other methods and approaches to reach this goal.

Does not require grammatical mastery of language.

References1999 SIL International The Natural Approach

http://www.sil.org/lingualinks/languagelearning/waystoapproachlanguagelearning/thenaturalapproach.htm

Principles and Methodology http://www.englishraven.com/method_natural.html

http://blog.hjenglish.com/yococo/articles/473035.html

http://www2.vobs.at/ludescher/Alternative%20methods/natural_approach.htm