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Why talk about language teaching methods at all? In recent years, a number of writers have criticized the very concept of method in our field. “Let’s just focus on learners and teachers and everything else will fall into place,” they seem to suggest. Some say that teachers see methods as prescriptions for classroom behavior and follow them too closely, too inflexibly. By contrast, others argue that in planning their lessons, teachers don’t really think about codified methods at all. In the one view, methods and the prefabricated materials that embody them reduce teachers to mere technicians; in the other, teachers are mere improvisers in the here-and-now, with no use for general statements about how teaching acts may fit together. Either view should make any writer about methods and materials stop and think.

Having stopped and thought, I find myself giving a single reply to both of the above objections: Language teachers are simply not “mere.” They are neither mere technicians nor mere improvisers. They are professionals who make their own decisions, informed by their own experiences but informed also by the findings of researchers and by the accumulated, distilled, crystallized experience of their peers.

Let me then suggest three questions that we might well ask about “method,” together with my proposed answers:

What is a “method”? A method is more concrete than an approach. An approach is a set of understandings about what is at stake in learning and also about the equipment, mechanical or neurological, that is at work in learning. At the same time, a method is more abstract than a teaching act, which is a one-time event that can be recorded on videotape and on the neurocortexes of learners.

Is it possible to evaluate or to profit from an approach without embodying it in some kind of school? Possible, perhaps, to some limited degree, but not easy.

Is it possible to improvise teaching acts apart from some more or less conscious approach? Possible, perhaps, but rare.

“Method,” then, seems to occupy a strategic mid-position between approach and ______ . For this reason, whoever would either think usefully about teaching or would teach thoughtfully can profit from learning about methods.

(E. W. Stevick, Working with Teaching Methods)