Principles
- Classroom instructions are conducted exclusively in the target language.
- Only everyday vocabulary and sentences are taught during the initial phase; grammar, reading and writing are introduced in intermediate phase.
- Oral communication skills are built up in a carefully graded progression organized around question-and-answer exchanges between teachers and students in small, intensive classes.
- Grammar is taught inductively.
- New teaching points are introduced orally.
- Concrete vocabulary is taught through demonstration, objects, and pictures; abstract vocabulary is taught by association of ideas.
- Both speech and listening comprehensions are taught.
- Correct pronunciation and grammar are emphasized.
- Student should be speaking approximately 80% of the time during the lesson.
- Students are taught from inception to ask questions as well as answer them.
Read more about this topic: Direct Method (education)
Famous quotes containing the word principles:
“It is a life-and-death conflict between all those grand, universal, man-respecting principles which we call by the comprehensive term democracy, and all those partial, person-respecting, class-favoring elements which we group together under that silver-slippered word aristocracy. If this war does not mean that, it means nothing.”
—Antoinette Brown Blackwell (1825–1921)
“[E]very thing is useful which contributes to fix us in the principles and practice of virtue.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“In child rearing it would unquestionably be easier if a child were to do something because we say so. The authoritarian method does expedite things, but it does not produce independent functioning. If a child has not mastered the underlying principles of human interactions and merely conforms out of coercion or conditioning, he has no tools to use, no resources to apply in the next situation that confronts him.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)