The Natural Approach (Language Acquisition in the Classroom)

This is a must-read for any foreign language teacher. It has helped me immensely as a teacher. Even though the book was written a while ago, it is all still relevant today.

This book, written originally in the 80's was the precursor to the widely popular and highly effective language acquisition software known as the Rosetta Stone. If you want to understand why that program is so successful, this is the place to learn it. We introduced this approach to teach beginning semesters of German to college students who had no other language training and with it were able to bring them to higher proficiency levels in a shorter time than other method used at the university. Great book, Easy read, plenty of humor, and very insightful.

The author discusses theory in the first chapters and practice in the last chapters. I was more interested in theory, so the book seemed to diminuendo. For a reader who is more interested in practice, the book may seem to crescendo. First, the author makes a quick overview of the history of second language education. It seems that the student's own language was barred from the classroom for the first time in the first decade of the Twentieth Century. If this is true, then most foreign language teachers today are 100 years behind the times. A Korean English teacher once told me that it was dangerous for foreign language students to practice conversation where there was no teacher or no native speaker to correct errors. I didn't have the documentation handy, so I couldn't tell her that students could do better without all that error correction anyway. Too bad I didn't have the documentation in this book. The author also summarizes schools of foreign language education other than his own baby. I have wondered how nouns could be taught in TPR (Total Physical Response), now I see that they are used as objects ("Put the book on the table"). The psychological method, the series method, the phonetic method, the direct method, and the audiolingual method are briefly defined.

Firstly, I have to say that the reason I bought the book is have more knowledge about teaching the English language. My job is Teaching English, so I was really interested in reading the book, as it has helped me quite a lot as it deals with teaching English in my classes. the book has been quite useful in that the authors suggest many techniques ,