Grammatical drills, mentioned in the second paragraph, form...

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    The disjunction between method as conceptualized by theorists and method as conducted by teachers is the direct consequence of the inherent 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 situations are unpredictably numerous, no idealized method can visualize all the variables in advance in order to provide situation-specific suggestions that practicing teachers need to tackle the challenges they are confronted with every day of their professional lives.

    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 correction was not only favored but considered necessary; at another, it was frowned upon. These extreme swings create conditions where certain aspects of learning and teaching get overly emphasized while certain others are utterly ignored, depending on which way the pendulum swings.

    The limitations of the concept of method gradually led to statements such as “the term method is a label without substance” (Clarke, 1983, p. 109), and that it has “diminished rather than enhanced our understanding of language teaching” (Pennycook, 1989, p. 597). This realization has resulted in a widespread dissatisfaction with the concept of method.

(Kumaravadivelu, B. Beyond Methods: Macrostrategies for language teaching. Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2003. Adaptado)