The two papers in this section reexamine the notion of methods of teaching and offer
complementary perspectives on how the nature of teaching can be understood. Although
for much of the twentieth century a primary concern of the language teaching profession
was to find more effective methods of language teaching, by the twenty-first century there
has been a movement away from a preoccupation with generic teaching methods toward a
more complex view of language teaching which encompasses a multifaceted understanding
of the teaching and learning processes. Brown traces this movement from a preoccupation
with “methods” to a focus on “pedagogy.”
The notion of teaching methods has had a long history in language teaching, as is
witnessed by the rise and fall of a variety of methods throughout the recent history of
language teaching. Some, such as Audiolingualism, became the orthodox teaching methods
of the 1970s in many parts of the world. Other guru-led methods such as the Silent Way
attracted small but devoted followers in the 1980s and beyond, but attract little attention
today. Many teachers have found the notion of methods attractive over the last one hundred
or so years, since they offer apparently foolproof systems for classroom instruction and
are hence sometimes embraced enthusiastically as a panacea for the “language teaching
problem.” The 1970s and 1980s were perhaps the years of greatest enthusiasm for methods.
In what has been called the “post-methods era,” attention has shifted to teaching and learning
processes and the contributions of the individual teacher to language teaching pedagogy.
Brown discusses a number of reasons for the decline of the methods syndrome in
contemporary discussions of language teaching. As he and others have commented, the
5