The term methods, as currently used in the literature on second and foreign language (L2) teaching, does not refer to what teachers actually do in the classroom; rather, it refers to established methods conceptualized and constructed by experts in the field. The exact number of methods that are commonly used is unclear. A book published in the mid sixties, for instance, provides a list of fifteen “most common” types of methods “still in use in one form or another in various parts of the world” (Mackey, 1965, p. 151). Two books published in the mid eighties (Larsen-Freeman, 1986; and Richards and Rodgers, 1986)—which have longoccupied the top two ranks among the books prescribed for methods classes in the United States—provide, between them, a list of eleven methods that are currently used. They are (in alphabetical order): Audiolingual Method, Communicative Methods, Community Language Learning, Direct Method, Grammar-Translation Method, Natural Approach, Oral Approach, Silent Way, Situational Language Teaching, Suggestopedia, and Total Physical Response.

It would be wrong to assume that these eleven methods provide eleven different paths to language teaching. In fact, there is considerable overlap in their theoretical as well as practical approaches to L2 learning and teaching. Sometimes, as Wilga Rivers (1991, p. 283) rightly points out, what appears to be a radically new method is more often than not a variant of existing methods presented with “the fresh paint of a new terminology that camouflages their fundamental similarity.” It is therefore useful, for the purpose of analysis and understanding, to cluster these methods in terms of certain identifiable common features. One way of doing that is to classify them as (a) language-centered methods, (b) learner-centered methods, and (c) learning-centered methods.

Adapted from: Kumaravadivelu, B. Beyond Methods: Macrostrategies for language teaching. Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003.