Page 40 - Beyond Methods

28 Understanding postmethod pedagogy
cal bases for the study of language, language learning, and language teaching. Classroom procedures are teaching and learning tech- niques indicated by the syllabus designer and/or the materials pro- ducer, and adopted/adapted by the teacher and the learner in order to jointly accomplish the goals of language learning and teaching in the classroom.
Classroom teachers have always found it difficult to use any of the established methods as designed and delivered to them. In fact, even the authors of the two textbooks on methods widely used in the United States were uneasy about the efficacy of the methods they selected to include in their books, and wisely refrained from rec- ommending any of them for adoption. “Our goal,” Richards and Rodgers (1986, p. viii) told their readers, “is to enable teachers to become better informed about the nature, strengths, and weaknesses of methods and approaches so they can better arrive at their own judgments and decisions.” Larsen-Freeman (1986, p. 1) went a step further and explicitly warned her readers that “the inclusion of a method in this book should not be construed as an endorsement of that method. What is being recommended is that, in the interest of becoming informed about existing choices, you investigate each method” (emphasis as in original).
Limitations of the Concept of Method
The disjunction between method as conceptualized by theorists and method as conducted by teachers is the direct consequence of the in- herent limitations of the concept of method itself. First and foremost, methods are based on idealized concepts geared toward idealized contexts. Since language learning and teaching needs, wants, and sit- uations are unpredictably numerous, no idealized method can visu- alize all the variables in advance in order to provide situation-specific suggestions that practicing teachers sorely need to tackle the chal- lenges they confront every day of their professional lives. As a pre- dominantly top-down exercise, the conception and construction of methods have been largely guided by a one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter approach that assumes a common clientele with common goals.
Not anchored in any specific learning and teaching context, and caught up in the whirlwind of fashion, methods tend to wildly drift from one theoretical extreme to the other. At one time, grammatical drills were considered the right way to teach; at another, they were given up in favor of communicative tasks. At one time, explicit error