natural approach

well, I read a lot of my classmates´ comments and I agree, the natural approach is a "theory had a great influence for teaching a second language", while i was readin about the natural approach I read about the krashen´s book "NATURAL APPROACH" which combined a comprehensive second language acquisition theory with a curriculum for language classrooms. The influence of Natural Approach can be seen especially in current EFL textbooks and teachers resource books such as The Lexical Approach (Lewis, 1993).
"The Natural Approach is very appealing – who wouldn’t want to learn a language the natural way, and what language teacher doesn’t think about what kind of input to provide for students. However, upon closer examination of Krashen’s hypotheses and Terrell’s methods, they fail to provide the goods for a workable system. In fact, within the covers of “The Natural Approach”, the weaknesses that other authors criticize can be seen playing themselves out into proof of the failure of Krashen’s model."
http://www.stanford.edu/~kenro/LAU/ICLangLit/NaturalApproach.htm
California Commission on Teacher Credentialing Home Page. Revised Knowledge and Skill Areas Assessed on Tests 1-3 of the (Bilingual) Crosscultural, Language and Academic Development (CLAD/BCLAD). 1998. California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. 14 December 2000.

Direct method is an assumption that the language learner should think directly on the language they want to learn. In this method, the learner learns the language through conversations, discussions, and reading. It has nothing to do with grammar. You also don´t take your first language as a base or support. The first lessons are taught by pointing at pictures and performing actions. In this method translation is abolished, and there is no use of your mother tounge. Oral teaching is the base of the method, and reading and writing should be used only a bit. ¨The use of disconnected sentences is replaced by the use of connected texts.¨Pronuciation is taught with the phonetic bases of the language that is set as your target. The main point of this method is to make the learner learn the language as he learned his mother toungue. Also, to be able to learn the language without the necessity of translating. Even though this method seems to work, it still has its ups and downs.

http://purwarno-linguistics.blogspot.com/2006/01/direct-method.html