Page 36 - Beyond Methods

24 Understanding postmethod pedagogy
outlines of a macrostrategic framework that is consistent with the characteristics of a postmethod pedagogy—a framework on which I will elaborate throughout the rest of this book.
The Concept of Method
A core course in Theory and Practice of Methods, with the same or a different title, is an integral part of language teacher education programs all over the world. A survey of 120 teacher education programs in Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) in the United States, for instance, shows that the Methods course functions as the primary vehicle for the development of basic knowledge and skill in the prospective teacher (Grosse, 1991). The survey also shows that specific classroom techniques receive “the greatest amount of attention and time in the methods courses” (p. 32) and that the three books that top the list of textbooks that are widely prescribed for methods classes “deal almost exclusively with specific language teaching methods” (p. 38).
The term methods, as currently used in the literature on second and foreign language (L2) teaching, does not refer to what teachers actually do in the classroom; rather, it refers to established methods conceptualized and constructed by experts in the field. The exact number of methods that are commonly used is unclear. A book published in the mid sixties, for instance, provides a list of fifteen “most common” types of methods “still in use in one form or an- other in various parts of the world” (Mackey, 1965, p. 151). Two books published in the mid eighties (Larsen-Freeman, 1986; and Richards and Rodgers, 1986)—which have long-occupied the top two ranks among the books prescribed for methods classes in the United States—provide, between them, a list of eleven methods that are currently used. They are (in alphabetical order): Audiolingual Method, Communicative Methods, Community Language Learning, Direct Method, Grammar-Translation Method, Natural Approach, Oral Approach, Silent Way, Situational Language Teaching, Sug- gestopedia, and Total Physical Response.
It would be wrong to assume that these eleven methods provide eleven different paths to language teaching. In fact, there is consid- erable overlap in their theoretical as well as practical approaches to L2 learning and teaching. Sometimes, as Wilga Rivers (1991, p. 283) rightly points out, what appears to be a radically new method is more