“This approach is based on the active involvement of the learner in speaking and listening to the foreign language in realistic everyday situations. No use is made of the learner’s mother tongue; learners are encouraged to think in the foreign language, and not to translate into or out of it. A great deal of emphasis is placed on good pronunciation, often introducing students to phonetic transcription before they see the standard orthography. Formal grammatical rules and terminology are avoided.”

(Adapted from “Teaching Methods”, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 3rd ed. David Crystal. P.394.)