An oral approach should not be confused with the obsolete Direct Method, which meant only that the learner was bewildered by a flow of ungraded speech, suffering all the difficulties he would have encountered in picking up the language in its normal environment losing most of the compensating benefits of better contextualization in those circumstances. (Patterson 1964: 4).

RICHARDS, J. C. & RODGERS, T. Approaches and methods in language teaching. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. P. 33