Here is how Wikipedia describes Krashen’s Natural Approach:
…the natural approach is a method of language teaching developed by Stephen Krashen and Tracy Terrell in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It aims to foster naturalistic language acquisition in a classroom setting, and to this end it emphasizes communication, and places decreased importance on conscious grammar study and explicit correction of student errors. Efforts are also made to make the learning environment as stress-free as possible. In the natural approach, language output is not forced, but allowed to emerge spontaneously after students have attended to large amounts of comprehensible language input….
This description does not describe TPRS. It may describe Blaine Ray’s original intentions, but I do not think that it describes what TPRS has become. I feel that 2017 would be a good year to clarify this discrepancy in our community.
How to best define the discrepancy? Perhaps with this quote from Oscar Wilde:
“We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.”
It’s a starting point anyway. I have to go on record as saying that what TPRS has slowly become over the past twenty years is a way of teaching kids how to remember.