readers respond

From madness in method tomethod in madness

Kanavillil Rajagopalan

It has been said of the play King Lear, by Shakespeare, that its plot couldbe summed up as a progression from madness in method to methodin madness. At the beginning of the play, we see the king who, in his desireto be methodical to the hilt, indulges in an act of total insanity. Interestinglythough, it is only when madness installs itself completely that the king getsto grips with some home truths. In what may appear to be profoundlycontradictory, madness both exacerbates his single-minded arrogance andshows him a way out of it. It is in his uncontrollable madness that hebecomes truly methodical.

Are we entitled to conclude therefore that method and madness go handin hand? David Bell’s timely and very interesting paper ‘Do teachers thinkthat methods are dead?’ (Bell 2007) seems to point precisely in thatdirection. The recent history that Bell recounts of ups and downs inacademic thinking on the use of method in language teaching shows us thatwhat has really happened over the years is that, from the ashes of a completedisenchantment with method, the phoenix of method has been reborn.In other words, the summary rejection of method created an atmosphereof a complete free-for-all, a state of total madness, which in turn made thewhole idea of method look once again attractive.

But I think there is much more going on here than a simple pendulumswing between two extreme positions. What the resurgence of interest inmethod, or the realization of the indispensability of method, clearly shows isthat the world of academic research is still aloof from the day-to-daypreoccupations of the classroom teacher. There is still the proverbial slipbetween the cup and the lip which, if anything, only seems to be widening.Let me explain. The idea that a teaching method must derive its forcefrom an approach to teaching on the one hand and must, on the other hand,be put in practice through a set of actual classroom techniques—allconsonant with it—was born on the drawing board of an applied linguist, inan act of solemn meditation on how things should be in an ideal world.

In an ideal world (i.e. the philosopher’s dream-world), of course, theorywould orient and underwrite practice, as the good old Socratic precept wouldhave it (Rajagopalan 2004). In other words, it is invariably a chain reactionfrom top to bottom: as theoreticians conjure up new and evermoreingenious theories, new approaches to language teaching are formulated,

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which in turn necessitate new methods in tune with those approaches.These methods, in their turn, spawn new classroom techniques. To cite anexample at random, rote learning, which was actively encouraged whenbehaviourism was the order of the day, was abandoned overnight witha cataclysmic paradigm change in theoretical linguistics in the 1950s. Butthis only left many a classroom teacher completely disoriented sincethere was nothing else to take its place. In fact, generative linguistics that,from now on, called all the shots, even let it be known that it had nothingto say about how languages are to be taught. So, classroom teachers wereall of a sudden left in the lurch, forced to fend for themselves.

So teachers are not to blame if they evidence a certain ‘fatigue’ or impatiencewith fashions as they come and go in the unearthly world of theory. Ofparticular relevance here is the fact that even many of those who claim to bepractice-oriented, abandoned all preoccupation with practice to revel inarmchair theorizing or, as van Lier put it ‘the linguistics in appliedlinguistics has veered off in the direction of theory (in a sense, therefore, hasleft applied linguistics), leaving pedagogy to cope with the practical sideof things’ (van Lier 1994). Of pertinence here as well is Bell’s remark thatit is not uncommon to come across attempts to contemplate ‘method asprimarily theory driven and therefore context insensitive’ (Bell op. cit.: 137).

What I am suggesting is, in other words, that a good deal of academicdiscussion about the usefulness or otherwise of language teachingmethod is taking place in the other-world of theory where there is little or noconcern with what goes on the classroom. Small wonder that teachers,who have to carry on with the business of language teaching on a daily basisand under conditions that do not change in tune with new trends in theworld of theory, have begun to assume an attitude of ‘but the caravan goeson’. Thus, when Bell (op. cit.: 143) concludes his paper with the observationthat teachers in general feel that ‘[m]ethods, however the term is defined, arenot dead’, he is only pointing to what teachers cannot afford to ignore onpain of rocking the very boat they are sailing: the indispensability of method.This is especially striking if we concede that ‘methods are goal-oriented,systematic and concerned with techniques’ (Bell op. cit.: 137) and hence tosimply throw them overboard is to make the boat rudderless. Here wehave yet another proof that the madness installed by all the hype aboutthe demise of method had to result in a new method in madness.

ReferencesBell, D. 2007. ‘Do teachers think that methods aredead?’ ELT Journal 61/2: 135–43.Rajagopalan, K. 2004. ‘The philosophy of appliedlinguistics’ in A. Davies and C. Elder (eds.)Handbookof Applied Linguistics. London and New York:Blackwell Publishers: 397–420.van Lier, L. 1994. ‘Educational linguistics: field andproject’ in J. E. Alatis (ed.). Georgetown University

Round Table on Language and Linguistics.Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press:32–59.

The authorKanavillil Rajagopalan is a Professor of Linguistics atthe State University at Campinas (UNICAMP,Brazil).Email: rajagopalan@uol.com.br

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