The Structural Approach, which consists of selecting and grading the structures of a language rather than the words. Of course, words are also selected and graded, but the main emphasis is put on teaching the students a command of the structures. Once they know these frames or patterns, they can fit words into them easily enough. For instance, once they know the pattern If……had been….. would have (done), they can easily learn words to put into the blanks and brackets; but if they only know lists of words, they cannot possibly speak, understand, read or write a sentence. Strictly speaking, the Structural Approach should deal not only with sentence pattern (syntactical structures), but also with such things as the sound patterns of a language (phonological structures), the patterns of words (how they are built up from smaller pieces, or morphological structures), different meanings of words and patterns, and idioms. All these should be selected and graded.

                        The Structural Approach is not a method of teaching: it is an approach. Any method can be used with it. Once the structures have been selected and graded, it would be possible to teach them by grammar and translation, or by the Direct Method, or by any other method one could think of.

Uses and Limitations of the Structural Approach:
                       Now that we know what the Structural Approach is and also what it is not, we can examine it to see how far it fits into our aims and means. The mere selection and grading of structures will not solve the problems we have. It will help us to prepare materials for the teacher, because it will help us to take one thing at a time, to have the easier things before the more difficult ones, and to have those which can serve as a good basis for teaching other things, coming before the latter. It will also make it much easier for us to keep track of what we have taught at any given point so that we can know.
  • What we can expect the pupils to have no difficulty with and  
  • What we should revise
                             But the structural approach will not provide the teacher with advice on how to present each new teaching point, nor with drills for consolidating it nor with reading material, nor with material for written exercise. All this has to be prepared, in great detail, If we are to provide the average teacher with what he desperately needs if he is to break the vicious circle. And we must never forget that it is the pupil that should be the centre of our interest, not the material. If an order of grading the structures is excellent in theory, but does not work in practice, because the material which one can write on the basis of it is nonsensical, or terribly boring or psychologically unsuited to pupils of the target level, we have to change the order of grading.



The Situational Approach:
                             The Structural Approach is often combined with the Situation Approach, which means that everything that is taught should be taught in a situation or context that links the words with the thing they refer to. If you want to teach ‘This is a book’, you should actually take a book and demonstrate to the pupils what you are talking about. The utterance, ‘This is a book’ should grow out of the situation of having a book and wanted to tell the pupils what its name is in English. The meaning of words and of structures are only the situations in which they can be used. Without the situational approach, teachers are liable to fall into the mistake of thinking that there is some advantage in drilling words and structures without reference to meaning, which means without putting them in any context. Even drill can be made interesting if they are always made to arise out of a situation. Instead of getting one pupils after another to repeat ‘John is not in the garden’, When there is nobody called john in the class and there is not a garden in sight, you could have a meaningful drill by writing up the names of the pupils who are absent on the blackboard, and then mentioning names of pupils one and getting one pupil at a time to respond with the correct form: e.g. Ram is in this room, Sita is in this room, Ashok isn’t in this room, etc. 


The Oral Approach: 
It happens that the Structural Approach grew up at a time when the Oral Approach was popular, so it usually linked with that. The Oral Approach is based on the belief that the easiest way to learn a language, even if ultimately you want only to be able to read it, is to start orally- the teacher presenting all new material orally, with the students only listening, and then the student using it themselves in speech, before any reading or writing of the material is attempted.


The Drill Method: 
Besides the Oral Approach, the Structural Approach is usually linked with the Drill Method. Followers of the Drill Method believe that we learn a thing by hearing it, speaking it, reading it or and/or writing it many times. A thing cannot usually stick in our heads if we hear, speak, see or write it only once: only repetition can ensure retention. Until the thing to be learnt is so well known that we can instantaneously recall it when we need it, it is not really known.

In the case of weak, unimaginative teachers, this sometimes degenerates into mechanical repetition of what they want their students to learn: This is a book, This is a book, This is a book, etc. But such drill is both extremely boring and inefficient. The brain just ceases to register after a time: the words roll mechanically out of the pupils’ minds without any real impression on the brain. Furthermore, the words cease to be associated with any meaning, or any situation in the students’ minds.


Communicative Approach 
The communicative Approach also known as communicative language teaching (CLT) emphasizes interaction and problem solving as both the means and the ultimate goal of learning English. As such, it tends to emphasize activities such as role play, pair work and group work. It switched traditional language teaching’s emphasis on grammar and the teacher-centred classroom, to that of the active use of authentic language in learning and acquisition

CLT is interested in giving students the skills to be able to communicate under various circumstances. As such, it place less emphasis on the learning of specific grammatical rules and more on obtaining native-speaker like fluency and pronunciation students are assessed on their level of communicative competence rather than on their explicit knowledge. It is more of an approach or philosophy than a highly structured methodology. David Nunan listed five key elements to the communicative approach.
  1. An emphasis on learning to communicate through interaction in the target language.
  2. The introduction of authentic texts into the learning situation.
  3. The provision of opportunities for learners to focus not only on the language but also on the learning process itself. 
  4. An enhancement of the learners own personal experiences as important contributing elements to classroom learning.
  5. An attempt to link classroom language learning with language activation outside the classroom.