Natural Approach Method

The Natural Approach Method to L2 Instruction: Teaching L2 without a Textbook and with Minimal Grammar

Students in traditional language learning classrooms are often unable to communicate orally in their second language. They are usually able to read and write, and to perform well on tests of grammar. The Natural Approach leads students to be able to communicate orally with excellent listening comprehension and with correct usage that reflects good grammar. The absence of textbooks and consumable workbooks makes the Natural Approach a desirable choice in current school fiscal environments. 

Alan N. Crawford, Emeritus Professor
California State University, Los Angeles.

The Overview of the Natural Approach Method

The Natural Approach belongs to a tradition of language teaching methods based on observation and interpretation of how learners acquire both first and second languages in nonformal settings. Such methods reject the formal (grammatical) organization of language as a prerequisite to teaching. They hold with Newmark and Reibel that “an adult can effectively be taught by grammatically unordered materials” and that such an approach is, indeed, “the only learning process which we know for certain will produce mastery of the language at a native level”.

Yi Liu, China West Normal University, Shida Road, Nanchong, Sichuan, China. Scientific Journal of Technology, Volume 6 Issue 5, 2024  ISSN: 2688‐8645 

Language exposure induced neuroplasticity in the bilingual brain: a follow-up fMRI study

Although several studies have shown that language exposure crucially influence the cerebral representation of bilinguals, the effects of short-term change of language exposure in daily life upon language control areas in bilinguals are less known. To explore this issue, we employed follow-up fMRI to investigate whether differential exposure induces neuroplastic changes in the language control network in high-proficient Cantonese (L1)-Mandarin (L2) early bilinguals. The same 10 subjects underwent twice BOLD-fMRI scans while performing a silent narration task which corresponded to two different language exposure conditions, CON-1 (L1/L2 usage percentage, 50%:50%) and CON-2 (L1/L2 usage percentage, 90%:10%). We report a strong effect of language exposure in areas related to language control for the less exposed language. Interestingly, these significant effects were present after only a 30-day period of differential language exposure. These findings strongly support the hypothesis that even short periods of differential exposure to a given language may induce significant neuroplastic changes in areas responsible for language control. 

Tu L, Wang J, Abutalebi J, Jiang B, Pan X, Li M, Gao W, Yang Y, Liang B, Lu Z, Huang R. Language exposure induced neuroplasticity in the bilingual brain: a follow-up fMRI study. Cortex. 2015 Mar;64:8-19. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2014.09.019. Epub 2014 Oct 7. PMID: 25461703.

A critical period for second language acquisition: Evidence from 2/3 million English speakers

Children learn language more easily than adults, though when and why this ability declines have been obscure for both empirical reasons (underpowered studies) and conceptual reasons (measuring the ultimate attainment of learners who started at different ages cannot by itself reveal changes in underlying learning ability). We address both limitations with a dataset of unprecedented size (669,498 native and non-native English speakers) and a computational model that estimates the trajectory of underlying learning ability by disentangling current age, age at first exposure, and years of experience. This allows us to provide the first direct estimate of how grammar-learning ability changes with age, finding that it is preserved almost to the crux of adulthood (17.4 years old) and then declines steadily. The results support the existence of a sharply-defined critical period for language acquisition, but the age of offset is much later than previously speculated. 

Hartshorne JK, Tenenbaum JB, Pinker S. A critical period for second language acquisition: Evidence from 2/3 million English speakers. Cognition. 2018 Aug;177:263-277. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.04.007. Epub 2018 May 2. PMID: 29729947; PMCID: PMC6559801.

ERPs show that classroom-instructed late second language learners rely on the same prosodic cues in syntactic parsing as native speakers

The loss of brain plasticity after a ‘critical period’ in childhood has often been argued to prevent late language learners from using the same neurocognitive mechanisms as native speakers and, therefore, from attaining a high level of second language (L2) proficiency [7,11]. However, more recent behavioral and electrophysiological research has challenged this ‘Critical Period Hypothesis’, demonstrating that even late L2 learners can display native-like performance and brain activation patterns [17], especially after longer periods of immersion in an L2 environment. Here we use event-related potentials (ERPs) to show that native-like processing can also be observed in the largely under-researched domain of speech prosody – even when L2 learners are exposed to their second language almost exclusively in a classroom setting. Participants listened to spoken sentences whose prosodic boundaries would either cooperate or conflict with the syntactic structure. These data suggest that L2 immersion is not always necessary to master complex L2 speech processing in a native-like way. 

Nickels S, Opitz B, Steinhauer K. ERPs show that classroom-instructed late second language learners rely on the same prosodic cues in syntactic parsing as native speakers. Neurosci Lett. 2013 Dec 17;557 Pt B:107-11. doi: 10.1016/j.neulet.2013.10.019. Epub 2013 Oct 18. PMID: 24141083.