The method of teaching in which the teacher tries to establish a link between…

Language-teaching methods differ in how they connect meaning to the target language, and specifically in whether the learner's mother tongue is used as a bridge. In the Direct Method, the teacher deliberately builds a direct association between a target-language word and the real object, action, or picture it denotes, bypassing translation altogether so the learner starts thinking in the new language from the first lesson.

The stem describes exactly this technique — a teacher linking a foreign-language word to the object it names without the interference of the learner's mother tongue. That is the defining feature of the Direct Method, still cited in pedagogy exams as the archetype of an association-based, translation-free approach.

• the bilingual method deliberately keeps the mother tongue in the lesson, presenting each target-language item alongside its native-language equivalent — translation is the bridge, not something avoided.

• the structural method organizes teaching around graded grammatical structures and pattern drills; whether the mother tongue is used is incidental to it, not its defining feature.

• the grammar-translation method teaches by translating passages both ways and explaining rules in the learner's native language — translation is its core tool, the opposite of the technique described in the stem.