CURRICULUM, INSTRUCTION, AND PEDAGOGY

published: 14 April 2022

doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.757684

Finding Our Bearings in Post-method

Waters
William Littlewood 1 and Shufang Wang 2*
1
Language Centre, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong SAR, China, 2 School of Languages and
Communication Studies, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China

This paper proposes a framework to guide us in designing and implementing our classroom
language pedagogy. It is based on three major principles which the teacher can keep constantly
in mind: that the learners need to be engaged, that the language needs to be memorized,
and that learning needs to move toward communicative competence. Each principle generates
between two and four dimensions which the teacher can use to develop specific strategies.
Keywords: post-method pedagogy, principles of communication, principles and dimensions of learning and
teaching, engagement, memorization, communication

SEARCHING FOR THE “RIGHT METHOD”

Language teaching nowadays is often described as being in a “post-method” stage. After the
decades-long “search for the right method,” in which teachers have been urged to implement
Edited by:
whatever method was officially supported (such as the audio-lingual method or situational
Zhengdong Gan,
University of Macau, China language teaching) as the recipe for successful learning in every situation, it is now generally
recognized that language learning is too complex, and there are too many differences in
Reviewed by:
Aydin Durgunoglu,
contexts, learners, and teachers, for us to find a “one-size-fits-all” solution. So we should base
University of Minnesota Duluth, our work not on the prescriptions expressed in set methods but on more general “macro-
United States principles,” which satisfy the fundamental requirements of language learning but can be implemented
Lawrence Jun Zhang, in ways that suit specific teaching situations. In other words, the principles themselves should
University of Auckland, New Zealand be “context-free” but the ways of implementing them should be “context-sensitive” (Littlewood, 2014).
*Correspondence:
Shufang Wang
wangsf@bjtu.edu.cn SEARCHING FOR MACRO-PRINCIPLES
Specialty section: There have been several proposals for such macro-principles. Some proposals are derived
This article was submitted to
primarily from the accumulated professional experience of teachers (e.g., Kumaravadivelu, 2006;
Educational Psychology,
a section of the journal
Richards, 2006) whilst others are based mainly on what we know from research about how
Frontiers in Psychology second languages are acquired (e.g., Ellis, 2005; Dörnyei, 2013). As one example, Dörnyei
(2013) suggests that teachers should base their methodology on the principles that it should:
Received: 12 August 2021
Accepted: 21 March 2022
1. be meaning-focused and personally significant,
Published: 14 April 2022
2. include controlled practice activities,
Citation:
3. provide explicit initial input,
Littlewood W and Wang S (2022)
Finding Our Bearings in Post-method
4. seek an optimal balance between implicit and explicit instruction,
Waters. 5. recognize the importance of formulaic language,
Front. Psychol. 13:757684. 6. provide exposure to large amounts of second language input, and
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.757684 7. provide ample opportunities for genuine second language interaction.

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Littlewood and Wang Finding Our Bearings in Post-method Waters

For each macro-principle, the individual teacher can design Principle 1: Learning Occurs Through
specific classroom strategies and techniques suited to in his Engagement
or her situation. For example, the first principle above is based Engagement is obviously a key condition for learning to take
on the general principle that language learning should place. How else would learning opportunities be processed and
be motivated by personal interest, but what is “personally become meaningful? However, it is not uncommon to enter
significant” for (say) a group of adult learners will point the a classroom and find students who are paying little attention
teacher to develop very different strategies from those for a (or even none at all) to the learning opportunities that occur there.
group of elementary school learners. Although the importance of engagement is obvious to the
practicing teacher, it is only comparatively recently that the
nature and conditions of engagement have been studied
CLEARING AWAY MYTHS FROM THE systematically. Based on recent work and their own analysis,
PAST Philp and Duchesne (2016) distinguish four important dimensions
of engagement in the classroom:
At the same time as searching for core principles, teachers
have been keen to clear away some of the “myths” which • Behavioral engagement, e.g., the learners spend time on task
have been handed down from the past, which have often and participate in the work.
been accepted without question but may obstruct teachers • Social engagement, e.g., the learners are willing to listen to
from designing their own approach. Here are some of the and cooperate with others.
myths mentioned (and questioned) by Chia (2022) and • Emotional engagement, e.g., the learners feel motivation,
Richards (2022): the use of the students’ mother tongue in enthusiasm, and enjoyment.
the classroom is absolutely forbidden; exams and tests are • Cognitive engagement, e.g., the learners pay sustained
an essential part of language learning; native speaker teachers attention and try to make sense of what is new.
are better than non-native speakers; we should be teaching
These dimensions are interdependent and intertwined. For
British English or American English; anyone who can speak
example, social engagement leads naturally to the other three
English can teach English; grammar is not a priority in
dimensions—this is one of the justifications for cooperative
communicative language teaching. Readers will be able to
and task-based learning.
quote many other myths based on beliefs which were once
Each of these dimensions of engagement is also supported
widely accepted but are now either questioned or
by the key factors which Keller (2010) includes in his influential
rejected completely.
“ARCS model of motivational design”:

• Attention: arouse learners’ interest and learning curiosity, e.g.,

DEVELOPING A FRAMEWORK TO through novelty and variety: there are elements of the unusual
GUIDE TEACHING or unexpected, as well as through authenticity: activities are
associated with students’ own selves and interests.
This article will work from three basic features of language • Relevance: satisfy the personal demands and targets of
learning and use them to develop a framework for classroom learners, e.g., through personalization: students link what they
teaching which is both simple enough to guide our practice do in class with their lives outside it and through autonomy:
and rich enough to generate new ideas. These are the essential students are allowed to make personal choices.
pillars on which the framework is based: • Confidence: assist learners in believing in their success and
promote success, e.g., through emotional and intellectual
• Learning comes from engagement (since it is only through safety: students feel free to take risks, as well as through
engagement that individuals connect with learning relatedness: students feel socially connected to other
opportunities). classmates.
• Language must be memorized (otherwise new material will • Satisfaction: enhance achievement with rewards (internal and
not be available for use beyond the immediate situation external), e.g., through learning that is supported by
of learning). collaboration and sharing in a spirit of community challenge:
• Language learning serves the requirements of communication students feel stimulated and rewarded by an acceptable degree
(for most people, that is, the main source of their motivation). of challenge.
The paper will now elaborate briefly on each of these pillars
and then build them into a framework which, it is hoped, is Principle 2: Language Must Be Memorized
based on principles which are not only clear and coherent If the new language material is not remembered, it will not
enough to underpin teaching-in-action but also sufficiently be available for future use. Yet like engagement, memorization
generative to stimulate creativity and innovation. For the sake has also often been neglected in our discussions about pedagogy.
of clarity, the main components of the framework will be called In reviewing Bilbrough (2011), one of the few language teaching
“principles” and under each principle, we will distinguish handbooks devoted specifically to memory activities, Maley
between 2 and 4 “dimensions.” (2013) suggests that this might be partly due to current

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Littlewood and Wang Finding Our Bearings in Post-method Waters

preoccupations with communicative approaches and our Activities which aim to develop the “part-skills” of
association of memorization with rote learning techniques. communication may focus on the forms of language, e.g.,
In an excellent “very short introduction” to memory, Foster formation of tenses or order of words, without any attention
(2009) reviews some dimensions which support memorization. to meanings.
These lie within the scope of the language teacher’s influence:
• Focus on forms and meanings
• Depth of processing
More often, an activity may focus not only on forms but
This is highlighted again and again as the key factor in memory. also on the meanings that these forms convey, without yet
It refers to the level at which learners process new material engaging the learners in communicating messages. An example
when it is first encountered. Since the seminal work of Craik is the “question-and-answer” practice often used in situational
and Lockhart (1972), studies have consistently shown that the language teaching.
more meaningful the new material is and the more the whole
person is engaged, the deeper and more lasting the memory • Focus on forms, meanings, and messages
traces are. For example, if new material is related to previous
The next stage in the development of communicative
knowledge or to the learner’s own life and interests, it is remembered
competence is when the learners also use these forms and
more strongly than, say, disconnected items which are encountered
meanings to communicate messages. Examples are the
only in a superficial way. Studies also show that in general material
information gap activities and surveys which form an important
is remembered better if it is related to everyday life, the concrete
component in communicative language teaching,
world, and the situations where it will need to be used.
Depth of processing is significant both for intentional memory • Communicative interaction
(e.g., learning vocabulary for a test) and for incidental learning
(e.g., subconscious acquisition in the course of communication). The goal of language pedagogy is that learners use language
creatively for expressing their own meanings, both in writing
• Practice and in speaking, and for responding to the meanings of others.
They engage in creative role-play, problem-solving, and free
Studies have consistently demonstrated the importance of
discussion. They have scope to express their own identities
practice. Two important concepts for language teachers are
and the class becomes a community of learners. This is the
“massed” practice and “distributed” practice. Studies have
goal of our teaching.
consistently shown that, given the same total learning time,
The rationale and nature of this continuum is explored in
practice which is distributed over a number of learning occasions
more detail in Littlewood (2011), where “communicative
separated by intervals produces stronger and more lasting
interaction” is further divided into “structured communication”
memory (see the comprehensive synthesis in Cepeda et al.,
and “authentic communication” to reflect different degrees
2006). In a real classroom setting studied by Seabrook et al.
of creativity.
(2005), “children whose teaching [in core literacy skills] consisted
of three 2-min sessions per day showed more than six times
the improvement of those who were taught for one 6-min
session per day.” The implications for language teachers are SUMMARY OF PRINCIPLES AND
obvious but in most classroom settings, of course, a series of DIMENSIONS IN CLASSROOM
short sessions requires more complex organization than one LANGUAGE TEACHING
single massed session.
The 10 factors proposed above can be converted directly into
macro-principles comparable to those of Dörnyei (2013) and
Principle 3: Our Pedagogy Should the other authors mentioned above (e.g., “teachers need to
Recognize a Continuum of Learning attend to motivational engagement”; “learning occurs most
Activities From Form-Focused Work to effectively when there is a deep level of processing”; “teachers
Involvement in Communicative Interaction need to stimulate communicative interaction within a
The processes involved in the first two principles apply to all community of learners”). Alternatively, they can be situated
forms of learning: all learning requires memorization and as dimensions in a more fluid framework which allows us
engagement. For language teaching, we need to consider how to better conceive them as operating simultaneously and
to harness these processes in the service of learning to interactively to form a coherent pedagogy. This is represented
communicate. Thus, we need to assess how each activity in Figure 1.
contributes to learners’ communicative competence. The three major principles govern every moment of our
To facilitate this, we can conceptualize learning activities teaching: we constantly need to consider the extent and nature
as below, in terms of a continuum from those which focus of our students’ engagement, the measures we and they can
on forms to those which involve communicative interaction: take to strengthen memorization, and the relationship of the
classroom activities to the goal of using language for
• Focus on forms communication. The dimensions within each principle focus

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Littlewood and Wang Finding Our Bearings in Post-method Waters

CONCLUSION
This article has proposed a framework for language pedagogy
which, though simple, is also faithful to the essential nature
of learning and communication. In the classroom, its principles
and dimensions may be implemented through strategies which
are appropriate to specific contexts and also correspond to
each teacher’s “sense of plausibility” based on experience (Maley,
2019; Prabhu, 2019). The authors hope that the article will
be helpful in suggesting ways forward as we negotiate the
waters of post-method language pedagogy.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

The original contributions presented in the study are included
in the article/supplementary material, and further inquiries
can be directed to the corresponding author.
FIGURE 1 | Principles and dimensions in classroom language teaching.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
on methodological strategies for implementation. These
strategies will be sensitive to the specific context in which All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual
we teach. contribution to the work and approved it for publication.

Maley, A. (Ed.). (2019). Developing Expertise Through Experience. London:

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Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 4 April 2022 | Volume 13 | Article 757684