Discuss the procedures of the Natural Approach in teaching four skills. What are the four basic stages of SLA mentioned in the Natural Approach? [N.U. 2017]



Ans. Krashen and Terrell (1983) approach course organization from two points of view. First, they list some typical goals for language courses and suggest which of these goals are the ones at which the Natural Approach aims. They list such goals under four areas: Basic personal communication skills: oral (e.g.. listening to announcements in public places) Basic personal communication skills: written (e.g., reading and writing personal letters)


Academic learning skills: oral (e.g., listening to a lecture)

Academic learning skills: written (e.g., taking notes in class)

Of these, they note that the Natural Approach is primarily designed to develop basic communication skills both oral and written. They then observe that communication goals may be expressed in terms of situations, functions and topics and proceed to order four pages of topics and situations which are likely to be most useful to beginning students. The functions are not specified or suggested but are felt to derive naturally-from. This approach to syllabus design would appear to derive to some extent from threshold level specifications.

The Second point of view holds that the purpose of a language course will vary according to the needs of the students and their particular interests.

The goals of Natural Approach class are based on an assessment of student needs. We determine the situations in which they will use the target language and the sorts of topics they will have to communicate information about. In setting communication goals, we do not expect the students at the end of a particular course to have acquired a certain group of structures or forms. Instead we expect them to deal with a particular set of topics in a given situation. We do not organize the activities of the class about a grammatical syllabus. From this point of view, it is difficult to specify communicative goals that necessarily fit the needs of all students. Thus, any list of topics and situations must be understood as syllabus suggestions rather than as specifications

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