Post 80: The Direct Method in Foreign Language Teaching (Second Language Acquisition)

Post 80: The Direct Method

What is the Direct Method or The Natural Approach or The Natural Method?

The direct method of teaching, which is sometimes called the natural method, and is often (but not exclusively) used in teaching foreign languages, refrains from using the learners' native language and uses only the target language. For instance, if I am teaching French, I would teach French without using any English. I would only use French to teach French to American students. From day 1, I use French and students understand meaning from context. The teacher's job is to provide enough context (comprehensible input) for students to be able to infer meaning from context. For instance, the student watches a video of a telephone conversation in French where a French person answers his phone. The French person says, "Bonjour, ca va bien?" and that is enough context for the student to guess he is saying, "Hello, how are you?".  The objective of The Direct Method is to teach only in the target language. The teacher never teaches the foreign language by using the student's target language.

How do you teach grammar rules without speaking English to beginning French students?

You write a series of sentences with the same pattern. Then you ask the students what that pattern is and from that pattern, you have the students guess what the grammar rule is. The teacher puts up on the board the following sentences:

La femme
La table
la canadienne
la chanteuse
la nature
la riviere

le soldat
le chanteur
le canadien
le jouet
le quai

Then, you show a picture of a woman, and indicate to the students by pointing to the 'la' words and you show a picture of a man and point to the 'le' words. Then you ask students what grammar pattern that they see and what grammar rule in French this applies to. If students do not get the rule, you give more 'le' and 'la' examples. You can even point to the letters. Whatever you do, you cannot speak English. Eventually, students realize that the nouns in French that end in 'e' are usually feminine, while the nouns in French that do not end in 'e' are usually masculine. I say 'usually' because there are grammar exceptions and you have to teach the grammar exception in a separate lesson. So, when you use the Natural Method, notice how I had the teacher show pictures and play charades? Well, the use of body language or playing charades is known as TPR, Total Physical Response.

One of the characteristics of TPR is learning grammar inductively. By having students learn grammar inductively, then the teacher triggers Chomsky's Language Acquisition Device (LAD) inside the student's brain enabling the students to learn a second language just like they learned their first language when they were babies. The Natural Method seeks to replicate as close as possible how the human brain learned language as a baby.



Total Physical Response = The Direct Method = Communicative Approach = The Natural Method.

TPR, Total Physical Response is when teachers use gestures to get students to understand the meaning of what is being said. Students then guess what you are saying from the body gestures. The characteristics of TPR are the coordination of speech and action to facilitate language learning;  inductive grammar learning, in which meaning is more important than form. In TPR and in all Natural Method approaches, speaking is delayed until comprehension skills are established. Effective learning takes place in a low stress environment. T

  In this way, the student learns without having to resort to his native language for translation. The goal is to avoid having students associate French words with English words, and for students to have in his/her brain the meaning of a French word directly go into the brain as that French word, hence The Direct Method. That way when a student wants to retrieve from his/her brain how to say a particular French word, his/her brain will retrieve that French word rather than having to translate that French word into English and then translate that word back into French.

Nothing is more frustrating than not being able to speak a language fast. When people talk to each other, they do not want to stop the flow of the conversation in order to translate from their head a certain foreign language word. By learning the target language through TPR, students replicate how children learn a native language where the brain encodes the word directly without using of the student's native language just like how children learn language.

It is really hard to teach beginning French students without resorting to the student's native language too. If taught properly, students should find (TPR=The Natural Approach=The Communicative Approach = The Direct Method) a fun way to learn a language. When I taught TPR, I had a whole binder filled with pictures and I made the language lesson into a game. Just like small children, adults can also have fun learning a new language the way children do without having to memorize boring grammar rules or do boring oral drills like in the Learning Approach to teaching a foreign language.

Many language learning programs such as Rosetta Stone use The Natural Method where they have students learn a foreign language without memorizing grammar rules (Learning View) and students learn language by recognizing patterns (Acquisition View). In the AC view, focus is on meaning while in L view, focus is on form. RS uses pictures to teach the target language.