English Language Teaching in its Social Context

Chapter 10Michael H. LongFOCUS ON FORM: A DESIGN FEATURE INLANGUAGE TEACHING METHODOLOGYAgainst methodsANGUAGE TEACHER EDUCATION PROGRAMS PERSIST inL presenting classroom options to trainees in terms of methods. While many have stoppedpretending that any one method is a panacea or at least that they know which one is, mostnevertheless continue to use method as a unit of analysis in their professionally orientedcourses, and some even give college credit for training in particular methods taught by theirdevelopers or licensed acolytes. Books on methods sell very well, books surveying methodsdo even better, and expensive one-day “seminars” offering training in particular methodsarc rarely short of customers.Yet it is no cxaggcration to say that language teaching methodsdo not exist ~ at least, not where they would matter, if they did, in the classroom.There arc at least four reasons for avoiding the methods trap. First, even as idealizedby their developers, groups of methods overlap considerably, prescribing and proscribingmany of the same classroom practices. For example, while one method may have teachersprovide feedback on error using hand-signals, and one verbally, both prescribe “errorcorrection”. Almost all methods in fact advocate error correction (Krashen and Scliger1975).Second, when third parties analyze lesson transcripts ~ records of what teachers andlearners actually do, as opposed to what methodologists tell them to do ~ brief excerptscan occasionally be identified as the product of this or that method, but the classificationsusually have to be made on the basis of one or two salient but (as far as we know) trivialfeatures, e.g. whether students arc informed of the commission of error verbally or nonverbally.Quite lengthy excerpts arc often impossible to distinguish, especially if taken fromreal classes, as opposed to staged demonstration lessons (Dinsmorc 1985; Nunan 1987).Third, studies that have set out to compare the effectiveness of supposedly quitedifferent methods (e.g. Scherer and Wcrtheimcr 1964; Smith 1970;Von Elck and Oskarsson1975) have typically found little or no advantage for one over another, or only local andusually short-lived advantages. One interpretation of such results is that methods do notmatter. Another is that methods do not exist, among other reasons, because most teacherstend to do much the same things (many methods require this, after all), whatever they aresupposed to be doing, especially over time. The abscncc of a systematic observationalcomponent in most of the comparative methods studies makes either interpretation