1. POST-METHOD
 Conceptualizing our roles and acts as
TESOL professionals
 Understanding Post-method pedagogy
WEEK 3

2. Agenda
• Three BIG ideas/theories you acquired.
• Discussion of teacher roles: Teachers as passive technicians,
teachers as reflective practitioners and teachers as transformative
intellectuals.
• Introduction to Post-method methodology
• Discussion of Critical Pedagogy

3. QUIZ!
• In a piece of paper, define these important vocabulary form this
week’s readings:
1) Teachers as technicians 6) Pedagogy of particularity
2) Teachers as reflective practitioners 7) Pedagogy of practicality
3) Teachers as a transformative 8) Pedagogy of possibility
intellectual
4) Critical Pedagogy
5) Teachers’ theory of practice

4. Teachers as passive technicians
• Primary goals:
• Advantages and disadvantages:
• A technique that represent this role:

5. Teachers as reflective practitioners
• Primary goals:
• Advantages and disadvantages:
• A technique that represent this role:

6. Teachers as transformative intellectuals
• Primary goals:
• Advantages and disadvantages:
• A technique that represent this role:

7. TRANSFORMATIVE INTELLECTUALS
• This idea is derived mainly from the works of critical pedagogists
and through the philosophy of the Brazilian thinker Paulo Freire
• Schools and colleges are not simply instructional sites; they are,
in fact, “cultural arenas where heterogeneous ideological,
discursive, and social forms collide in an unremitting struggle for
dominance”
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:
What are the implications of becoming a transformative intellectual?
For what reasons would you support or oppose the extended role
that teachers as transformative intellectuals are expected to play?

8. What constitutes a “theory”? Who constructs a
“theory”? What constitutes practice?
Theory:
• Constitutes a set of insights and concepts derived from academic
disciplines.
• Theoretical knowledge is necessary to become a language teacher
Practice:
• Set of teaching and learning strategies informed by theory
Reciprocal relationship between theory and practice.
What’s the relationship between theorists and practitioners? Do
practitioners always apply theories?

9. Bridging theory and practice
• Theory in TESOL/Applied linguistics can be defined as a set of
insights, frameworks and concepts derived from disciplines such as
education, second language acquisition, anthropology, cognitive
psychology and linguistics.
• Practice in TESOL/Applied Linguistics
• The relationship between theorists and practitioners is NOT like the
producer and the consumer.

10. What are the differences between professional
theory and personal theory?
• Professional Theory: perpetuated within the professional culture.
theories that are transmitted via professional training in colleges
• Personal Theory: individual theory unique to each person which is
developed by putting professional theories into practice-
Teachers as implementers?
Critical Pedagogists criticized this distinction! Teachers as
implementers approach diminished the role of teacher’s agency,
knowledge and sense of plausibility.- Teachers’ theory of practice
Theorizing as an intellectual activity

11. How can preservice teachers theorize from their
practice?
• Three types of knowledge:
1) Speculative theory
2) The findings of empirical research
3) The experiential knowledge
The importance of critical thinking instead of breath of content knowledge.
• Three levels of theorizing:
1) Technical level: Classroom-centered goals
2) Practical level: developing practice and evaluating your own practice
3) Critical, emancipatory level: Theorizing is concerned with ethical ,
historical and political issues.

12. KUMAR, CHAPTER 2
POST-METHOD PEDAGOGY

13. UNDERSTANDING POSTMETHOD PEDAGOGY
• What is post-method pedagogy?
--a model in teacher education that promotes context-sensitive
education based on a true understanding of local linguistic, social
and cultural peculiarities.
--raises teachers sociopolitical awareness and enables teachers to
construct their own theory of practice
--a model that treats learners as co-explorers.
Mainstream understanding of “method”—does not refer to what
teachers actually do in the classroom, but established methods
conceptualized by experts sometimes based on research
conducted in controlled environments.

14. Language Centered Methods
• “Language learning is intentional rather than
incidental.”(Kuma, p.25)
• Theory of Language: structural linguists view language as a
system consisting of several hierarchically linked building
blocks: morphemes, phonemes, phrases, clauses and
sentences.
• Each block/structure can be analyzed, described and
systematized and graded.
• Theory of Language learning: derived from behaviorism
(50s and 60s)

15. Language centered methods cont.
• Theory of Language learning: Behaviorist scientists
analyzed human behavior and observed that behaviors can
be reduced to a series of stimuli that trigger a series of
corresponding responses.
• Learning: stimulus—response—reinforcement: Learning to
speak a language is similar to learning how to ride a bike
• Learning is mechanical habit formation according to this
view.

16. Learner-Centered Methods
1. Concerned with learner needs.
2. Aim at making the learners grammatically correct and
communicatively fluent.
3. Language is a system of expressing meaning
4. The central purpose of language is communication.
5. Basic units of language are not merely grammatical and
structural, but also notional and functional.

17. Learning-centered methods
• Concerned with the learning process.
• Provides opportunities to create meaningful learning opportunities.
• Pre-occupation with meaning-making will lead to grammatical and
communicative mastery of the language.
What was the method of teaching when you learned your second
language?

18. Why dissatisfaction with the concept of method?
• Certain techniques were considered as the right way to teach; at
other, they were frowned upon.
• Pedagogical limitations of method:
1. Methods go through an endless cycle of life, death and rebirth.
Even the experts don’t know how many language teaching
methods are developed. What appears to be radically a different
method appears to be a variant of an existing method.
2. Each method specifies a set of theories and classroom
procedures. They overlap!
3. They may overlook the funds of knowledge students bring to
class or the tacit knowledge of the local teachers about the lives
of their students.
Methods should be informed by the understanding of the
sociocultural context.

19. Moving away from the notion of “method”?
• Rather than “prepackaged” set of procedures, teachers should
“develop, select, or adapt tasks which are appropriate in terms of
goals, inputs, activities, roles and setting” (Nunan, 1989, p.2).
• Method as “interested knowledge” (Pennycook, 1989)—promoting
inequalities.
• “Anti-method pedagogy” (Macedo, 1994)
• “Postmethod condition” (Kumaravadivelu, 1994)

20. The myths of methods
1. There is a best method out there ready and waiting to be
discovered—the implementation of any method should take into
account language policies, teacher profiles and learning needs
and variations.
2. Methods constitutes the organizing principle for language
teaching—method is too inadequate to explain the complex
process of language learning and teaching. The uncritical
acceptance of method has mislead to believe us that method has
the capacity to cater all learners.
3. Method has a universal value—learners across the world learn
languages for the various reasons and follow different paths.
4. Theorists conceive knowledge and practitioners consume
knowledge—Teachers do not simply follow the principles.
Teachers develop and follow context specific sequence of
activities.

21. Why do we need “postmethod condition”?
• Help us overcome the limitations of method-based pedagogy
• Empowers practitioners to construct personal theories of practice
• Enables practitioners to generate classroom -orientated strategies.
• Signifies teacher autonomy: How can teachers act autonomously?
How can we develop approaches to self-observe and self-analyze?
• Sense of plausibility: “subjective understanding of the teaching do”
(p.172)

22. Three parameters of postmethod pedagogy
1. Particularity: Context-sensitive and location-specific pedagogy
based on a true understanding of local, social, cultural, and
political particularities. Be sensitive to local context. Observe and
reflect!
2. Practicality: Ruptures the reified role relationship between
theorizers and practitioners by enabling them and encouraging
them, to theorize form their practice—teacher generated theory
of practice.
3. Possibility: Seeks to tap the sociopolitical consciousness that
students bring with them so that it can also function as a catalyst
for identity formation.

23. Pair work
• How do you think these parameters can guide your everyday
teaching?
• Go over the list of macrostrategies . Which ones are you already
familiar with? Can you add to this list?

24. CRITICAL
APPROACHES TO
TESOL
Pennycook, A.

25. WHERE TO START?

26. CRITICAL APPROACHES TO TESOL
• Should involve BOTH research and pedagogy.
• Transformative pedagogy: Aims to change/question status quo!
Greater sensitivity to inclusiveness.
• INCLUSIVITY- Struggle for diverse representations in the
classrooms and materials.
• Focus on race, gender, identity, relations of power, structure of
inequality
• View of language learning is not autonomous.
• Aims to ensure that marginalized students’ from less privileged
backgrounds gain access to mainstream discourses: “Access to
powerful linguistic and cultural tools”

27. What does it mean to be critical? What’s critical
theory, really?
• Taking social inequality and social transformation as center to one’s
work
• How aspects of popular culture are related to the forms of political
control and how particular forms of rationalism have come to
dominate other possible ways of thinking.
• Always turning a skeptical eye towards assumptions, ideas that
have become “nauturalized.”- Problemitizing the given
• Awareness of the limits of knowing. Being self reflexive.
• E.G. Brian Morgan (1997,1998) gives an example of his own
classroom to illustrate how critical practice in ESL can emerge from
community concerns. He writes “ a community-based, critical ESL
pedagogy doesn’t mean neglecting language. It means organizing
language around experiences that are immediate to students.”

28. Critical theory on youtube:
• What’s Critical Pedagogy?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFOhVdQt27c
Conversation with Paulo Freire:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFWjnkFypFA&feature=related
Conversation with Henry Giroux:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvCs6XkT3-o

29. CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF TESOL QUARTERLY
SPECIAL ISSUE ON CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN ELT
Get into groups of 4-5. Pick one article that presents critical ways to ELT.
Discuss the article based on your undestanding of Pennycook’s
Transformative Pedagogies:
• Critical Literacy article
• Critical Pedagogy in Brazil
• Community based approach to Critical pedagogy
• Becoming Black
• Participatory education for immigrant women
How do these studies explain transformative pedagogy? Do you see signs of
pedagogy of engagement/problemitizing practice/notion of learner
autonomy in this study? What are the research questions? What are the
data collection methods? What are the findings?

30. CREATE YOUR GROUP’S VISUAL
VISUAL ART ON LANGUAGE
EDUCATION:
IN GROUPS OF THREE, DRAW A
METAPHOR FOR YOUR DEFINITION
OF TEACHER AND CLASSROOM FROM
A POST-METHOD PEDAGOGY
PERSPECTIVE
What is your definition of a language
teacher?
How do you define classrooms and
classroom interaction?