English Language Teaching in its Social Context

THE DEVELOPMENT OF EFL METHODOLOGY 159Krashen andTerrcl1 saw the Natural Approach as ‘similar to other communicative approachesbeing developed’, and it can be seen as sharing the same goals as CLT (Krashen andTerrell1983: 17).The Natural Approach’s uniqueness lies in its model of learning. Krashen drew adistinction between conscious learning and ‘acquisition’, which parallels L1 development.Only language which is ‘acquired’ is seen as being available for natural language use.Language which has been ‘learnt’ can be used to monitor and correct output based on‘acquired’ learning, but that is all; a function which has obvious time constraints in naturallanguage processing.Learners ‘acquire’ new language by being exposed to ‘comprehensible input’. Suchinput is defined by Krashen as being comprehensible to the learner but containing languagejust above the learner’s current level. According to Krashen it is only comprehensible inputwhich facilitates acquisition, learner output is essentially irrelevant. Also according toKrashen learners are only able to acquire new grammatical structures in a certain order.This is called the Natural Order Hypothesis and is based on studies of children learningtheir LI which suggested a certain order of acquisition. This focus on grammaticalstructures, usually individual morphemes, suggests a grammatical view of language morein keeping with the audio-lingual tradition than CLT (Richards and Rogers 1986: 130).Krashen also thought that learning was influenced by the learner’s emotional state, anidea shared by humanistic approaches. Krashen argued that an ‘Affective Filter’ existed,which meant that learners who weren’t very motivated, lacked confidence or who wereanxious would not do as well as those who were motivated, confident and relaxed.The breadth of Krashen’s model obviously attracted a lot of attention, and it would notbe unreasonable to say that a lot of the claims on which it was based have been overturned.McLaughlin has shown that the acquisition/learning differentiation is hard to support andthat there is no need to postulate a ‘monitor’ based upon it (McLaughlin, 1987).Krashen’s ideas concerning cornprehcnsible input have also led to a great deal of debate.It has bcen clearly argued that comprehensible input is not the only, or even the mostimportant, factor in language learning (McLaughlin, 1987; White, 1987).The Natural OrderHypothesis and Affective Filter Hypothesis have also been subjected to criticism(McLaughlin, 1987). In the case of the former for methodological reasons concerning thecollection of data; in the case of the latter because it is unclear exactly how such a filterwould work, and alternative models seem better able to explain the evidence.It would be unfair to leave our discussion of the Natural Approach on such a criticalnote without acknowledging its role in increasing our understanding of the language learningprocess. Krashen’s model of language learning was an attempt to find a broad universalframework and although it is not widely accepted now, it has acted as a spur for a great dealof subsequent thinking and debate.Task based learning (TBL)Task based learning of languages is currently attracting a lot of attention. However, as withCLT, the definition of this methodology is not fixed. In general though it can bc said thatTBL methodologies:share a common idea: giving learners tasks to transact, rather than items to learn,provides an environment which best promotes the natural language learning process(Foster 1999)