The Socio-Cognitive Concept of Natural Pedagogy as a tool for Oral Learning and Teaching

Abstract

Oral language development has always played one of the most primary roles in the English foreign language learning process, as one of the primary skills in language; its proficiency is considered a major goal for foreign language teachers and learners alike. Furthermore, several linguistic theories have been devised and formulated in regards to language acquisition and learning and teaching processes. This paper explores the socio-cognitive concept of natural pedagogy as a method that can be implicitly found under numerous linguistic theories that deal with language acquisition and the learning and teaching processes. Unremarkably, its focus extends to several goals; the most prominent are conversational and communicative goals. Moreover, natural pedagogy engages adaptive complex human learning behaviours. The study conducted explicitly uses most of the basic tools of social interactions; such as body movements, gestures, facial expressions, eye contact, head movement, imitation, intonation, proxemics, observation, and specifically native-like language from the teacher. The current experiment includes a sample of 4 oral expression classrooms that were monitored, 2 of them with unchosen teachers that relied on the traditional presentation and peer-review fuelled methods. The other 2 classrooms with chosen teachers with native-like English speaking that were instructed to emphasize on including natural pedagogy tools. The findings of this study show that natural pedagogy classrooms outperformed the traditional ones in communication, in addition to showing more motivation and holding conversations in a more native-like manner.