Reevaluating Language Teaching Methods: Is the Traditional Approach Obsolete?

Mohammed Akram Nacif [1]

دراسة محكمة

ملخص 

تعد منهجية تدريس اللغة مسـألة ذات أهمية بالغة لاتزال موضوع نقاش واسع في أوساط أهل التخصص من أساتذة وباحثين. وقد برز مؤخرا توجه يقول ب’ موت المنهج ’بمعنى أننا اليوم نعيش ولادة منهج مستجد أساسه ‘اللامنهج’ في منهجية تدريس اللغة. نقطة البحث في هذا المقال تتمحور حول مناقشة مدى صحة هذا الزعم وهل فعلا نحن اليوم نشهد ‘موت’ المنهج في تدريس اللغة أم أن الأمر لا يعدو أن يكون اعتقادا لا صحة له باعتبار أن اعتماد واستعمال الكتاب المدرسي نفسه يعد ترسيخا فعليا وتكريسا بطريقة غير مباشرة لكل المناهج المتعارف عليها علميا. والحقيقة أنه لا يخلو كتاب مدرسي عند كتابة محتواه من اعتماد منهج ما يكون له مرجعا وإطارا نظريا يعطيه مصداقية وسندا علميا وجودة، ومن تم فكل مدرس، سواء علم بذلك أم لم يعلم، وسواء كان راغبا أم كارها، فهو يتبع منهجية ما، متمثلة في نظرية اللغة التي اعتمدها مؤلفو الكتاب المدرسي وفي الطريقة التي يعطي بها الكتاب الأولوية لأنواع معينة من الأنشطة على غيرها من باقي الأنواع.

الكلمات المفتاحية: اللغة؛ التدريس؛ المنهجية؛ المقاربة؛ الطريقة البعدية.

Résumé

La question de la pertinence de la méthodologie d'enseignement des langues a été largement débattue récemment. Assistons-nous à la ‘mort de la méthode’ ou le manuel a-t-il simplement été une réincarnation de la méthode de manière discrète ? Les enseignants qui croient ne pas adopter ou suivre une méthode spécifique, mais qui utilisent un manuel dans leur enseignement quotidien, sont autant liés par une méthode que les praticiens de la Méthode Directe, ou les défenseurs de la méthode Audio-orale à leur apogée respective. Evidemment, ces enseignants insisteront sur le fait qu'ils utilisent les manuels de manière sélective, conformément à leurs propres principes ainsi qu'aux besoins des apprenants. Mais quelle que soit la sélectivité de ces enseignants, ils sont toujours, volontairement ou non, liés à une théorie du langage, illustrée par la manière dont le matériel du manuel sélectionne et dépeint la langue, et à une théorie de l'apprentissage, incarnée dans la manière dont le manuel donne la priorité à certains types d'activités par rapport à d'autres.

Keywords : Language; teaching ;methodology; approach; post-method.

A language teaching method is “the level at which theory is put into practice and at which choices are made about the particular skills to be taught, the content to be taught and the order in which the content will be presented.” (Richards and Rodgers, 1986, p. 19) 

If you briefly survey teachers as to what method they buy into, you will most likely get answers like : ‘I don’t follow a method at all’, or ‘I prefer to be rather 'eclectic'’, and ‘I pick and choose from techniques and procedures associated with a variety of different methods’. Some might even say that, basically, their teaching follows the principles dictated by the communicative approach, itself an amalgam, embracing anything from drills to communicative tasks, and everything that exists in between. But the concept of a monolithic, prescriptive 'method' - as in the Direct Method, or the Oral/Auditory Method – seems now to be dead and done with.

That more and more teachers are less inclined to follow any particular method fits well with the modern prevalent view that we are now living in what has recently been termed a 'post-method' age in education. In his Fundamental Concepts of Language Teaching, Stern revealed that 'several developments indicate a shift in language pedagogy away from the single method concept as the main approach to language teaching' (1983, p. 477). One such development was the failure, on the part of researchers, to find any significant advantage in one method over another. As Richards (1990) stated, 'studies of the effectiveness of specific methods have had a hard time demonstrating that the method itself, rather than other factors, such as the teacher’s enthusiasm, or the novelty of the new method, was the crucial variable' (p. 36). Additionally, acknowledgment of the broad range of changing factors that influence second language learning fuelled a wide ranging discontent with the notion of a 'quick fix', or what, in the social sciences, is sometimes called the 'technical-rational approach', i.e. the belief that social change and improvement can be attained or accomplished through the strict application of scientific method. This had greatly been the spirit that urged the spread of audiolingualism, initially based upon research into animal behaviour. However, the social sciences started witnessing a challenge to 'scientism', especially in the last two decades of the 20th century, a challenge mainly associated with the emergence of postmodernism, and its abandonment of the idea of universalist, objective knowledge. Correspondingly, Pennycook (1989) argued that methods are never 'disinterested', but serve the dominant power structures in society, leading to 'a de-skilling of the role of teachers, and greater institutional control over classroom practice'(p. 610).

Towards the end of the last century, Kumaravadivelu (1994) similarly talked about what he called the 'postmethod condition', a result of 'the widespread dissatisfaction with the conventional concept of method' (p. 43). The idea is rather than readily accepting a single set of procedures, postmethod teachers adapt their approach in congruence with local, contextual factors, while at the same time being guided by a number of 'macrostrategies', more specifically two macrostrategies : 'Maximise learning opportunities' and 'Promote learner autonomy'. Four years before Kumaravadivelu’s work, Prabhu (1990) in a famous article asserted that there is no one method, but that teachers adopt an approach that corresponds uniquely with their 'sense of plausibility.' Thus, rather than blindly following a wholesale adoption of a teaching method, teachers utilize a discreet adaptation of its underlying principles, keeping only what they believe is plausible to put into practice and leaving out what they deem to be less useful.

All that said, and despite what advocates of the postmethod trend have said, it seems preposterous to claim that the notion of method has now completely faded away. In fact, it is still prevalent ;  you can find it anywhere, even if attempts have been made to replace the term itself with synonyms. Check out some internet advertising for language courses, for instance, you will come up against statements like these:

‘Duolingo is a language learning software that is now also available through ... The Duolingo method uses zero english to teach you a foreign language. ... is built around a concept called dynamic immersion, an unique learning method that uses a computer to mimic the ways in which you learnt your first language.’

‘Earworms is a unique language method that relies on audio lessons mixed into music. The theory is that you will find the music catchy and thus remember your lessons easily … it may be suitable for travelers or others who have given up on other methods.’

‘The Busuu method is broadly communicative, and based on how language is taught successfully in classrooms. The focus of each exercise within a course is to give the student something new - usually a word or a phrase - that they can use immediately in writing or conversation.’

It appears safe to claim that – in the mind of the general public, at least – the method concept is not dead. As Block (2001) notes, 'while method has been discredited at an etic level, it certainly retains a great deal of vitality at the grass-roots, emic level (that is, it is still part of the nomenclature of lay people and teachers)' (p. 72). This is an opinion rightly shared by Bell (2007) who interviewed a number of teachers on the issue, and came to the concusion that:

'Methods, however the term is defined, are not dead. Teachers seem to be aware of both the usefulness of methods and the need to go beyond them.' (p. 143).

However, in an interesting paper, Akbari (2008), using Iran as an instance, argues that, in EFL contexts, it is textbooks that have largely replaced methods in their conventional meaning:

'The concept of method has not been replaced by the concept of postmethod but rather by an era of textbook-defined practice. What the majority of teachers teach and how they teach... are now determined by textbooks' (p. 647).

As a matter of fact, the intentional amalgam of method with textbook is an idea deeply rooted in history, especially in the literature related to language teaching in Spanish, where method and textbook share a single name: método.

I shall similarly argue that the concept of method is not only vigorously alive and well, but has also been reskinned taking the form of coursebooks, in such a manner that it would be reasonably acceptable to say that textbook series like Headway and Cutting Edge – more than any other factor – are now directly shaping and dictating current teaching practice. In other words, rather than the método epitomizing a single specific method, the método is itslef the method in a much broader sense.

Now, a legitimate question rises here. What is a method? What is it, ultimately, that defines a method? Richards and Schmidt (2002) make the rational claim that 'different methods of language teaching... result from different views of:

a. the nature of language

b. the nature of second language learning

c. goals and objectives in teaching

d. the type of syllabus to use

e. the role of teachers, learners, instructional materials

f. the activities, techniques and procedures to use'

(p. 330)

Even a brief look at their content or at the manner they are marketed establishes the fact that the writers and publishers of textbooks take particular positions, either explicitly or implicitly, with regard to each of these areas. The theory of language that textbooks instantiate, for example, is clear from their contents pages, where language is typically understood and depicted as what Rutherford names a system of 'accumulated entities', an accumulation of linguistic items in which the role of teacher is to clarify them to the learners (Rutherford, 1987). As Basturkmen (1999) conjectured, after inspecting the back-cover blurbs of a number of present-day textbooks, 'the emphasis is on the underlying generative base or language rules rather than on surface level aspects of use' (p. 34).

Second/foreign language learning, as shown from textbooks, by and large follows a cognitive model, where factual knowledge is organized and taught through successive practice activities. For example, the back cover of Inside Out (Kay and Jones, 2001) makes the claim that 'easy-to-use exercises put rules into practice – and are then recycled as speaking activities'. As for 'the goals and objectives of language learning', these tend to go very much in accordance with those of the communicative approach. Inside Out, for instance, 'has been designed to develop real-life communicative skills and powers of self-expression' (Kay and Jones, op. cit), while Cutting Edge (Cunningham and Moor, 1998) aims at 'improved confidence and fluency' as well as 'a clearer understanding of how language is used'. (There is, obviously, no recognition that the discrete-item focus of the syllabus might be at odds with these more holistic objectives.) As far as the syllabus is concerned, the grammar ‘doctrine’ still holds way, but the influence of the lexical approach (Lewis, 1993) and of corpus linguistics (or ‘real life’ language) is now ostensibly clearer. Innovations (Dellar and Hocking, 2000) 'has a strongly lexical syllabus, presenting and practising hundreds of natural expressions which students will find immediately useful', and Natural English (Gairns and Redman, 2002) offers 'a new syllabus area called natural English – accessible, high-frequency phrases which intermediate students can pick up and use'.

Within the postmethod trend, the role of teachers, learners and instructional materials is most clearly demonstrated in the Teacher’s Book component, where the teacher’s role is both didactic and facilitative, and serves mainly to convey the textbook materials by, for example, explaining, demonstrating and modelling language items, and by setting up and monitoring student interactions. Gairns and Redman (2002) say:

'Once learners have thought about exercise 1, go over the language in the natural English box. You could model the phrases and replies yourself and ask learners to repeat them, then practise the two-line dialogues across the class' (p. 24).

The guidelines typically make the teacher as the center of attention, the locus of control in the classroom and even at times imply that the learners are potentially disruptive:

'Don’t let the false beginners dominate the real beginners or pull you along too quickly… Encourage [the false beginners] to concentrate on areas where they can improve (e.g. pronunciation) and don’t let them think they know it all!' [Oxenden and Seligson, 1996, p. 15]

Still, sporadic reference is made to the need to encourage learner agency and autonomy. For example, 'Choices within tasks encourage learners to take charge of interactions' (Kay and Jones, op. cit). Not unexpectedly, though, the textbook forms the core component of instruction: it is both the means and the message.

Lastly, the types of activities, techniques and procedures to use are derived from a range of methodological approaches. These activities rarely involve translation, or encourage the use of, or any reference to, the learners’ L1. The influence of the communicative approach appears to be strong, with most lessons including information-gap tasks, and texts that strive toward authenticity. There is a heavy focus on skills, and the distribution of the material gives more weight to skills-oriented activities than language-oriented ones. The dominant version/accent for representing English is a native-speaker one, and both the topics and the design of the materials reflect an 'aspirational culture' of travel, consumerism and popular culture (Gray, 2002).

Conclusions

These are, therefore, the characteristcs of a method, typically enmeshed in a método, inextricably linked to it. Clearly, teachers who believe not to be adopting or following a specific method, but who are using a textbook, are as much bound by a method than practitioners of the Direct Method, or advocates of the Audiolingual method during their respective heydays. Obviously, these teachers will insist that they use textbooks selectively, in accordance with their own principles as well as the needs of the learners. But however selective these teachers are, they are still, willingly or unwillingly, tied to a theory of language, exemplified in the way that the textbook material selects and depicts language, and to a theory of learning, as embodied in the way the textbook gives priority to certain types of activity over others.

 References

Akbari, R. (2008) Postmethod discourse and practice. TESOL Quarterly, 42/4.

Basturkman, H. (1999) A content analysis of ELT textbook blurbs: reflections on theory-in-use. RELC Journal, 30/1.

Bell, D. (2007) Do teachers think that methods are dead?  ELT Journal, 61.

Block, D. (2001) An exploration of the art and science debate in language education. In Bax, M, and Zwart, J.-W (eds.) Reflections on language and language learning: In honour of Arthur van Essen. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Cunningham, S. and Moor, P. (1998) Cutting Edge: Intermediate. Student’s Book. Harlow: Longman.

Dellar, H. and Hocking, D. (2000) Innovations. Hove: LTP.

Gairns, R. and Redman, S. (2002) natural English: Intermediate. Student’s Book. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gray, J. (2002) The global coursebook in English Language Teaching. In Block, D., and Cameron, D. (Eds). Globalization and language teaching. London: Routledge.

Kay, S., and Jones, V. (2001) Inside Out Upper Intermediate. Student’s Book. Oxford: Macmillan.

Kumaravadivelu, B. (1994) The Postmethod condition: (E)merging strategies for second/foreign language teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 28.

Lewis, M. (1993) The Lexical Approach. Hove: LTP.

Oxenden, C. and Seligson, P. (1996) English File 1: Teacher’s Book. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pennycook, A. (1989)  The concept of method, interested knowledge, and the politics of language teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 23.

Prabhu, N.S. (1990) There is no best method – why? TESOL Quarterly, 24.

Richards, J. (1990) The Language Teaching Matrix. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Richards, J. and Schmidt, R. (2002) Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics (3rd edn.) London: Longman.

Richards, Jack C. and Theodore S. Rodgers (1986). Approaches and methods in language teaching: A description and analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Rutherford, W. (1987) Second language grammar: Learning and Teaching. London: Longman.

Stern, H.H. (1983) Fundamental Concepts of Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[1] Associate Professor, CRMEF - Fes