• The Importance of Listening

 

Our method emphasizes the importance of listening to language development, and do not require spoken output in the early stages of learning. Students are not forced to speak. Instead, teachers wait until students acquire enough language through listening that they start to speak spontaneously.

 

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• Our goal: oral fluency

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Grammar is not explicitly taught but is learned by induction. Students are expected to subconsciously acquire the grammatical structure of the language through exposure to spoken language input, in addition to decoding the messages in the input to find their meaning.

The ultimate goal of the method is to develop oral fluency. We believe developing listening comprehension skills as the most efficient way of developing spoken language skills.

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• The Total Physical Response 

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The majority of class time is spent doing drills in which the instructor gives commands using the imperative mood. Students respond to these commands with physical actions. Initially, students learn the meaning of the commands they hear by direct observation. After they learn the meaning of the words in these commands, the teacher issues a command that uses novel combinations of the words the students have learned.

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• Friendly environment

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There is little error correction: our teachers are advised to treat learners' mistakes the same way a parent would treat their children's. Errors made by beginning-level students are usually overlooked, but as students become more advanced teachers may correct more of their errors. This is similar to parents raising their children; as children get older parents tend to correct their grammatical mistakes more often.

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