The Importance of the "Natural Approach" in Teaching Language

AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY

OF CHIAPAS.

Languages School, Campus III, San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas.

BACHELOR OF ARTS IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING

3rd. SEMESTER.

FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING.

“THE NATURAL APPROACH IN MY FUTURE DEVELOPED AS AN ENGLISH TEACHER”

Student: Guillermo Daniel Liévano Gómez.

Professor: Abel León Cuatécatl

November 18th, 2014.

INTRODUCTION

This essay talks about “The natural approach” that is a method of language teaching developed by Stephen Krashen and Tracy Terrell in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in addition it talks about how useful could it be for me in the future as an English teacher. It aims to foster naturalistic language acquisition in a classroom setting, for this reason I decided to choose this approach to apply it in the future. I think that this approach will be useful for me because It emphasizes communication and the grammar errors are not as important as the communication because all learning is a process and I think that the way that we learn better is in the natural way like in our first language, we learn first to identify words, then we try to speak and say sentences and finally we learn to speak and write grammatically correctly.

In the natural approach the language output is nor forced, It helps students to feel themselves comfortable while speaking because It emerge spontaneously.

It talks about the syllabus of this method that focuses on activities which Terrell sees as promoting subconscious language acquisition and that I could use it for my classes. The activities are divided into four main areas: content activities, such as learning a new subject in the target language, activities which focus on personalizing language, such as students sharing their favorite music, games, and problem-solving activities, with these activities I could reach the goals of the classes and make different and interesting classes. It is a good way to learn any kind of topic.

THE NATURAL APPROACH METHOD DEVELOPED AS AN ENGLISH TEACHER.

First of all, the natural approach sees communication as the primary function of language and it shares many features with the direct method (itself also known as the "natural method"), Both the natural approach and the direct method are based on the idea of enabling naturalistic language acquisition in the language classroom; they differ in that the natural approach puts less emphasis on practice and more on exposure to language input and on reducing learners' anxiety. For this reason the natural approach could be very useful as an English teacher because it focuses in communication and makes less emphasis in grammar structures, and the objective of learning target language is to reach the communication and no matter if the sentence was correctly.

Similarly, the Natural Approach, as defined by Krashen and Terrell, places less emphasis on teacher monologues, direct repetition, and formal questions and answers, and less focus on accurate production of target language sentences. It makes that the students don’t worry a lot about having mistakes while speaking or writing, instead of that in the Natural Approach there is an em¬phasis on exposure, or input, rather than practice; optimizing emotional preparedness for learning; a prolonged period of attention to what the language learners hear before they try to produce language; and a will¬ingness to use written and other materials as a source of comprehensible input.

The natural approach is for beginners and is designed to help them become intermediates, emphasizing on the central role that is the comprehension, like this way students will start understanding the target language and get acquainted with it.

Although Terrell originally created the natural approach without relying on a particular theoretical model, his subsequent collaboration with Krashen has meant that the method is often seen as an application to language teaching and it is very effective because of the syllabus.

Krashen outlined five hypotheses in his model that can be used for teaching the target language:

1. The acquisition-learning hypothesis. This states that there is a strict separation between conscious learning of language and subconscious acquisition of language, and that only acquisition can lead to fluent language use, because as we know students don’t realize how frequently they are improving, it just happen.

2. The monitor hypothesis. This states that language knowledge that is consciously learned can only be used to monitor output, not to generate new language. Monitoring output requires learners to be focused on the rule and to have time to apply it.

3. The input hypothesis. This states that language is acquired by exposure to comprehensible input at a level a little higher than that the learner can already understand. Krashen names this kind of input "i+1".

4. The natural order hypothesis. This states that learners acquire the grammatical features of a language in a fixed order, and that this is not affected by instruction.

5. The affective filter hypothesis. This states that learners must be relaxed and open to learning in order for language to be acquired. Learners who are nervous or distressed may not learn features in the input that more relaxed learners would pick up with little effort.

The structure of language, 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.)"

These principles result in classrooms where the teacher emphasizes interesting, comprehensible input and low-anxiety situations. Lessons in the natural approach focus on understanding messages in the foreign language, and place little or no importance

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