Natural and humanist approaches
Of greater impact than his linguistics, arguably, was Chomsky’s claim that ‘language acquisition
is based on the child’s discovery of what from a formal point of view is a deep and
abstract theory – a generative grammar of his language’ (1965: 58). The assumption that this
deep and abstract theory could be triggered into life simply by exposure to the target language
underlay what have been termed comprehension approaches (Winitz 1981). Both the natural
approach (Krashen and Terrell 1983) and total physical response (Asher 1977) assume that
language acquisition follows a predetermined path, and that, given the right conditions, this
‘natural’ route can be reactivated for second language acquisition. These conditions include
the provision of comprehensible input (Krashen 1981) during a ‘silent period’ and in a state of
low anxiety. Both approaches enlist direct method-type procedures, such as actions and pictures,
in order to ensure comprehensibility of input; at the production stage error correction is
avoided, in the interests of encouraging meaningful communication.
The emphasis on positive affective factors and their facilitative role in learning derives from
another psychological tradition that achieved prominence in the 1960s and 1970s: the humanist
psychology associated principally with the work of Carl Rogers (1969) and Abraham
Maslow (1968), and promoted through the writings of Moscowitz (1978) and Stevick (1980).
Humanistic education prioritizes personal growth and self-realization, goals which are achieved
when learners are invested affectively as well as intellectually in the learning process. A number
of language teaching methods that prioritized such principles emerged in close succession in
the decades that followed the demise of audiolingualism. These included the silent way (Gattegno
1972), community language learning (Curran 1976) and suggestopedia (Lozanov 1978).
While the methods themselves never became mainstream, humanistic principles have permeated
more orthodox practices, in the form, for example, of an emphasis on learner-centredness and
self-directed learning, a philosophy that, in turn, nourished the learner autonomy movement of
the 1980s and 1990s (Holec 1980). More recently, the humanistic tradition has absorbed
certain ‘new age’ training approaches, such as neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), and the
theory of multiple intelligences (Gardner 1983).