THE FORUM

TESOL Quarterly invites commentary on current trends or practices in the TESOL

profession. It also welcomes responses or rebuttals to any articles or remarks pub-
lished here in the Forum or elsewhere in the Quarterly.

Postmethod Discourse and Practice

RAMIN AKBARI
Tarbiat Modares University
Tehran, Iran

䡲 The second language (L2) teaching profession has gone through a

number of dramatic changes during the last two decades. Alook at jour-
nal articles and topics included in teacher development books shows a
broadening of scope in terms of the number and the depth of the topics
addressed. Language teaching, one can conclude, has become more
inclusive in the sense that more of the reality of the lives of students, and
at times those of teachers, are taken on board as significant in affecting
the outcomes of teaching and learning (Tudor, 2003). Topics such as
World Englishes (Kachru, 1986, 2005), critical applied linguistics (Carl-
son, 2004; Pennycook 2001; Toolan, 2002), critical discourse analysis
(Kumaravadivelu, 1999; Riggins, 1997), ethnography of communication
(Harklau, 2005; Hymes, 1996), qualitative research (Davis, 1995; Rich-
ards, 2003), and linguistic imperialism (Phillipson, 1992, 2003) have
turned into common themes of discussion and research. The social/
political consciousness one observes in the profession was certainly lack-
ing during most of the 1980s. Language teaching, in a sense, has parted
with its quest for metanarratives and grand theories and instead has
become involved in “the messy practice of crossing boundaries” (Canaga-
rajah, 2006, p. 30, emphasis in original).
A conceptual shift, however, which has not been completely appraised
and appreciated, is the disappearance of method from academic discus-
sions and the rise of the postmethod debate. The postmethod argument
has academically put an end to method discussions and the search for
the good method, although its practical counterpart, that is, methodol-
ogy, is still a valid concept and very much alive for many teachers (Bell,
2007). Even communicative language teaching is treated as a part of
history (although there are some exceptions; see, e.g., Savignon, 2001).

TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 42, No. 4, December 2008 641

Instead, the postmethod discourse (Canagarajah, 2001; Kumaravadivelu,
1994, 2001, 2003a, 2003b, 2005) has laid down a number of principles
according to which language teaching should proceed. These principles,
which address aspects of practice (pedagogy of practicality), context (peda-
gogy of particularity) and empowerment (pedagogy of possibility), aim at
providing a more comprehensive context for language teaching in terms
of its social engagement and political accountability.
Missing from postmethod discussions, however, is how teachers would
be prepared to perform their duties as postmethod practitioners because
the postmethod view heavily emphasizes teacher qualifications. Teach-
ers, in the postmethod paradigm, should be able to practice their pro-
fession with competence and confidence (Kumaravadivelu, 2001) and
ensure that their practice results in social transformation and the im-
provement of society by taking into account the life histories of their
students. Methods in the past provided frameworks for classroom prac-
tice by defining a view of learning and language (Richards & Rodgers,
2001) and supplied teachers with guidelines as to what presumably
worked and did not work in the class based on the objectives set down by
the method. Now that the method is gone, the question is how teachers
are going to develop the competence demanded of them in dealing with
pedagogical and social responsibilities assigned to them.
This brief article argues that, in reality, the postmethod is qualitatively
not much different from method because both of them ignore or mis-
represent the realities of the classroom and, in turn, impose their own
version of hypothetical reality. While method has ignored the reality of
learning and language learners, postmethod has ignored the realities of
teaching and language teachers. By making too many demands of teach-
ers, the postmethod pedagogy has, in practice, turned a blind eye to the
social, political, and cultural realities of language teaching contexts and
the limits within which teachers operate.
To present a balanced argument, the first part of this article gives a
brief account of what post method is, touches on some of its philosoph-
ical foundations, and acknowledges some of its contributions to current
English-language-teaching (ELT) discourse. The second part deals with
the features the postmethod discourse needs to take into account for it
to move from the realm of ideas to that of practice.

THE POSTMETHOD ERA

The early undocumented roots of postmethod can be traced back to

what the profession has called eclecticism; in other words, a primitive form
of postmethod or, more accurately, beyond method (Richards, 1990) has

642 TESOL QUARTERLY

been around for a long time. Though frowned on and at times discour-
aged, eclecticism has been accepted as a practical solution to instances
when a method has not been applicable, provided that it has been in-
formed eclecticism (Rivers, 1968). However, a closer look at eclecticism
reveals a sense of resistance (Canagarajah, 1999) on the part of practi-
tioners who have viewed method as an imposed, impractical construct.
The practice of adapting and adopting different techniques from differ-
ent methods has testified to the fact that the contexts in which teachers
find themselves are different from the ones postulated by methods, but
the profession was slow to formally acknowledge this fact.
The first reference to the term postmethod, nevertheless, goes back to
Kumaravadivelu (1994). Kumaravadivelu (2006b), however, traces the
roots of the method critique to scholars such as Pennycook (1989) and
Prabhu (1990). Pennycook argued that any knowledge is of a political,
interested nature in the sense that it represents and safeguards the views
of only a certain social group. In other words, knowledge is not objective
and any knowledge formulation (and here method can be viewed as a
formulation of how English should be taught) “reflects a particular view
of the world and is articulated in the interests of unequal power rela-
tionships” (pp. 589–590). Prabhu, following another line of argument,
rejected the concept of method because it is the teacher who should
make the crucial learning and teaching decisions about what works or
does not work in his or her classroom based on his or her sense of
plausibility or principled pragmatism (Kumaravadivelu, 2003b). Methods
do not help teachers in this decision-making process because, by nature,
methods are constructed in a general way to make them (vaguely) ap-
plicable to a wide range of contexts.
The postmethod discourse has tried to include these concerns in its
formulation, and the view of teaching it proposes apparently encom-
passes both matters of practice and politics. Three principles, or peda-
gogies, summarize how postmethod defines L2 teaching: practicality,
particularity, and possibility (Kumaravadivelu, 2001, 2003a, 2003b,
2005). The pedagogy of practicality aims at according equal importance to
practitioners’ theory vis-à-vis those of theoreticians and seeks to empower
teachers by encouraging them “to theorize from their practice and prac-
tice what they theorize” (Kumaravadivelu, 2006b, p. 59), and the pedagogy
of particularity is intended to sensitize practitioners to their students’
linguistic, social, and cultural background and needs. The pedagogy of
possibility relates language teaching to the process of social transforma-
tion by tapping “the sociopolitical consciousness that students bring with
them to the classroom” (Kumaravadivelu, 2006b, p. 59). Here language
teaching acknowledges the critical dimension of the profession.
Being linked to the principles of critical pedagogy is, in fact, one of
the strengths of the postmethod debate. Critical pedagogy deals with the

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questions of social justice and social transformation through education.
By viewing education as an intrinsically political, power-related activity,
supporters of critical pedagogy seek to expose its discriminatory foun-
dations and take steps toward reforming it so that groups who are left out
because of their gender, race, or social class are included and repre-
sented (Giroux, 1983). Critical pedagogy puts the classroom context into
the wider social context with the belief that “what happens in the class-
room should end up making a difference outside the classroom” (Bayn-
ham, 2006, p. 28). In language teaching, critical practice is “about con-
necting the word with the world. It is about recognizing language as
ideology, not just system. It is about extending the educational space to
the social, cultural, and political dynamics of language use” (Kumara-
vadivelu, 2006b, p. 70).
Postmethod’s wider recognition of context and its critical dimension
distinguish it from communicative language teaching (CLT). Bell
(2003), for example, finds striking similarities between the principles
and strategies of the postmethod debate and those of CLT; however, a
close inspection of CLT reveals that when the term context is used, it is at
the microlevel of who is talking to whom, where, and about what, but
context in postmethod terminology includes aspects of the real sociopo-
litical lives of the people involved in the learning process. In addition,
CLT does not have a critical appreciation of the classroom because for
CLT, negotiation of meaning and interpersonal communication—or “compe-
tence in terms of social interaction” (Kumravadivelu, 2006b, p. 60)—are
the two basic objectives envisaged by its proponents, and no effort is
made to link L2 teaching practice to social change.
The fact that the postmethod recognizes the need for more inclusive-
ness and empowerment is a positive turn of events with the potential for
many desirable outcomes. The problem is, ironically, that by trying to
include more of the realities of learners and learning context in its
formulation (in the form of pedagogies of particularity and possibility),
the postmethod discourse has lost sight of the reality of teaching and
teachers’ lives and has made the implementation of pedagogy of prac-
ticality (which is, in a sense, the practical culmination of the two other
pedagogies) problematic, if not impossible. The following section lists a
number of problems that must be dealt with if the postmethod view is to
be more relevant to the pedagogical concerns of teachers.

PROBELMATIZING POSTMETHOD
The realization of a postmethod pedagogy requires the existence of
an appropriate teacher education infrastructure as well as an acknowl-
edgement of the limits teachers face in their actual classroom lives.

644 TESOL QUARTERLY

 Kumaravadivelu (2005) is aware of the challenges a postmethod peda-
gogy will pose for a compatible L2 teacher education program, and
refers to two major sources of problems that must be addressed if the
postmethod is going to be accepted as the dominant L2 teacher educa-
tion framework: Pedagogical barriers and ideological barriers (pp. 215–
223).
Pedagogical barriers deal with entrenched models of teacher education
that rely on a transmission view of knowledge and treat L2 teacher edu-
cation as the process of transferring “a set of predetermined, prese-
lected, and presequenced body of knowledge from the teacher educator
to the prospective teacher” (Kumaravadivelu, 2005, p. 216), and the
ideological barrier refers to the politics of representation and what counts
as valid knowledge. Through a process of marginalization and self-
marginalization, teachers’ practical knowledge does not find the space
and the scope to be regarded as visible, and consequently, fails to be-
come part of the accepted knowledge of the discourse community. Ku-
maravadivelu, however, stops short of offering any viable, systematic so-
lution as to how these barriers can be overcome and what mechanisms
must be put in place to create the desirable context for teacher au-
tonomy and growth based on a postmethod pedagogy. In other words, in
spite of its emancipatory rhetoric, postmethod is more concerned with
the philosophy and philosophical discussions of teaching rather than the
actual practice of teaching itself. In its zeal for the transformation of
learners’ lives (which is undoubtedly a valid educational objective), the
postmethod has ignored the social and professional limitations teachers
confront in their day-to-day negotiation of their identities and their prac-
tice.
What is missing, in fact, is a proper understanding of the limits within
which teachers perform. That is, by assigning the extra roles of social
reformer and cultural critic to teachers, the postmethod is taking lan-
guage teaching beyond the realms of possibility and practice. The pro-
fession is totally aware of the fact that teachers operate within tight
administrative frameworks; they must take into account textbooks and
evaluations in the forms of tests. The restricting role of textbooks has
received just a cursory acknowledgement in Kumaravadivelu’s (2003b;
2006a) writings and basically in the context of imperialist or global forces
and not in the actual context of teachers’ practical lives. When Kuma-
ravadivelu talks about textbooks it is mostly in relation to “social, eco-
nomic, and political environment in which [teachers and students] op-
erate” (2006a, p. 20) and no reference is made to the rigid framework
that even locally produced books can impose on teachers’ actions. In
addition, in none of his writings does Kumaravadivelu seriously tell
teachers how to negotiate the administrative system that determines

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their standards of performance and their income because, it might be
argued, he knows himself that such systems are at ministry levels and lie
beyond the reach of many teachers. His use of a reflective model of
teaching complemented by observer comments and students’ feedback
(Kumaravadivelu, 2003b) only presents a generic solution to the teacher
education problem, one that is neither specific to nor completely in line
with ELT’s world of practice (Akbari, 2007) . Kumaravadivelu’s (2003b)
macrostrategies-mismatch observational scheme (p. 292) is only good for
in-service teachers, and although he presents observational-reflective
techniques for prospective teachers, he provides no systematic frame-
work on how novices can be initiated into the discourse and practice of
postmethod. The ideal classroom environment where teachers can ex-
ercise their free will, unfortunately, rarely exists in the reality of language
classrooms. One can detect an irony here: In the past, little attention was
paid to the social relevance and reality of L2 teaching and classroom
environments, but now we have an excessive preoccupation with these
constructs at the risk of ignoring the constraining realities of the class-
room in terms of teachers’ responsibilities.
Teachers in many contexts are not different from factory workers in
terms of their working hours; in many countries, a typical language
teacher works for 8 hours per day, 5 or even 6 days per week. Most of
these teachers are poorly paid and “putting bread on the table for my
family,” as one such teacher put it, is their main priority. The financial
and occupational constraints they work within do not leave them with
the time or the willingness to act as iconoclasts and social transformers,
roles that will jeopardize their often precarious means of subsistence.
Even if they have the time and the commitment, teachers sometimes feel
obliged to bypass some topics because they are deeply rooted in the
culture and traditions of a community and questioning them will amount
to sacrilege and blasphemy. Dealing with topics such as capital punish-
ment, marriage, and honor killings can cost a teacher his or her career
or freedom in some Arab or Muslim countries because of certain reli-
gious interpretations of such concepts.
Textbooks and tests create further constraints within which teachers
operate. Even if teachers do not openly subscribe to a method, the
textbooks they use provide them with a working plan that defines how
languages are taught and learned. In other words, many teachers have
laid their religion of method to rest and have adopted the practical
philosophy of coursebooks because the practical philosophy is more
tangible and convenient for classroom applications. Textbooks now take
care of all the details of classroom life, and most of them come with
teacher guides that include achievement tests and even all the examples
teachers need in their classes. Many teachers feel happy with such an

646 TESOL QUARTERLY

arrangement because their workload does not leave them with any time
for reflection and preparation, and textbooks (e.g., the New Interchange
or Headway series) have laid down the framework (or the method?)
within which they can operate. It seems, then, that the concept of
method has not been replaced by the concept of postmethod but rather
by an era of textbook-defined practice. What the majority of teachers
teach and how they teach (the things that are supposedly taken care of
by methods) are now determined by textbooks. In addition, almost all of
these textbooks are sanitized and neutralized (Gray, 2001, p. 159) to
make sure they do not lose their market potential, and in this process
most of the topics of interest for a critical or postmethod pedagogy are
removed, which limits teachers’ choices. Most of the topics one encoun-
ters in commercially prepared textbooks deal with harmless issues such
as travel, shopping, holidays, and food recipes, leaving little room for
social transformation and political-awareness raising.
Tests pose another challenge to what a teacher can do in his or her
classroom and are among the most important constraining elements for
a postmethod practitioner. In many contexts, teachers “are often respon-
sible for implementing the testing policies of central agencies with no
power and authority to resist” (Shohamy, 2004, p. 101). Tests are usually
used as instruments of control and supervision, and teachers are viewed
as bureaucrats or “servants of the system” (p. 106) who carry out the
orders of the system or the authorities in charge. Many teachers “view
tests not only as testing the language performance and proficiency level
of their students but also as assessing or testing their own performances”
(p. 107, emphasis added). In addition, tests also determine what knowl-
edge is legitimate by assessing it, thereby making it worth acquiring;
knowledge that is not assessed on the test is excluded and thereby de-
termined to be illegitimate. Such impositions highly limit the scope
within which teachers can exercise their postmethod rights and social
transformation roles, especially when they are confronted with high
stakes national tests. It is not surprising that teachers are asked to “be-
come more aware, or socially responsible and socially reflexive about the
uses of tests by pointing out such misuses to the public at large and by
resisting the ‘one size fits all’ approach” (p. 108). Whether teachers are
ever consulted about test formats or content and whether they are willing
to sacrifice their means of income and risk their professional security are
issues worthy of further contemplation on the part of proponents of the
postmethod discourse.
Teachers’ abilities and differences are among the issues which are
taken for granted in the postmethod debate. Numerous studies have
shown most teachers are not necessarily among the academically gifted
(see e.g., Guarino, Santibanez, & Daly, 2006) and certainly not all the

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teachers have the time, resources, or the willingness to shoulder the
responsibilities that ministries of (higher) education are normally en-
trusted with. The assumption of postmethod proponents is that all teach-
ers by default are qualified or willing to conduct a postmethod class with
all its social, cognitive, political, and cultural requirements. That assump-
tion, however, is questionable because many teachers lack the required
knowledge or skill to teach in the postmethod fashion. We should also
remember that for many teachers, teaching is a job not a career (Johns-
ton, 1997), and they are often not willing to participate in any profes-
sional development that would task them with extra responsibilities.
Many expatriate teachers, for example, are wary of a critical orientation
in their classes because they do not yet know the red lines and taboos; in
addition, they do not know about learning and teaching traditions of
their students in the new setting.
Postmethod literature, of course, includes references to the need for
a transformation-oriented teacher education program, but, again, it
seems to ignore teachers’ capabilities and potentials. Some basic ques-
tions must be addressed: Are all teachers versatile and qualified enough
to act as materials developers, test designers, revolutionaries, political
analysts, social workers, and brave iconoclasts to confront the system in
which they work and transform their students’ lives? Have postmethod
proponents ever asked teachers themselves whether they are willing to,
or capable of, taking up these challenges? Does the profession need a
new recruitment strategy by means of which only certain people with
certain social or ideological tendencies would be allowed in postmethod
classes? Can the profession find enough people to perform the list of
duties drawn up for them by postmethod academics? And if such people
are found, do they really become teachers, or do they find themselves
better jobs because of their high qualifications? If postmethod is really a
bottom-up movement, then it must stop abstract speculations and base
its claims on empirical data gathered from teachers themselves and their
world of practice.
Teachers’ professional development also can compromise teachers’
ability to be reflective practitioners in the sense promoted by post-
method discourse. According to Fuller (1970; see also Conway & Clark,
2003), teachers go through three stages in their professional growth,
each stage being characterized by a shift of emphasis as to what the
teacher regards as important. Stage 1 emphasizes the self. During this
stage, teachers want to present an ideal image of themselves as practi-
tioners, and they want to be liked by their students. Their practice at this
stage is highly influenced by images of an ideal teacher they have had in
the past. Stage 2 emphasizes classroom control and management. At this
stage, the ideal teacher image will be challenged by the reality of the

648 TESOL QUARTERLY

classroom, and teachers become concerned with survival and strategies
for integrating themselves into their professional context (i.e., school).
Stages 1 and 2 could take a sizeable portion of a teacher’s professional
development during his or her career. It is only in Stage 3 that teachers
develop the required confidence to dispense with classroom popularity
issues and begin to concentrate on ways to improve students’ learning
outcomes. Teachers at this stage are capable of developing their own
teaching strategies and moving toward formulating their own philoso-
phies of teaching and learning. In other words, teachers’ development is
a journey outward during which they are basically concerned about the
self (Stage 1), then move to a concern with the task (Stage 2), and end
up with a concern about students and teaching outcomes (Stage 3).
Practicing a postmethod pedagogy will only become possible at the third
stage, when survival and approval issues are no longer of concern and
when teachers have developed the necessary self-confidence to resist
administrative and financial pressures.

CONCLUSION

The problems that political ideologies and the academic world could
not solve—problems of injustice, marginalization and representation,
voice and inclusion, effective design and delivery of instructional mate-
rials—are now assigned to the lone postmethod practitioner. Most of
these problems also afflict the academic community of L2 teaching; in-
stances of injustice exist, for example, in the form of recruitment policies
and research grant allocations. Our academic discourse community is
still grappling with the unjust superiority afforded the native speaker
over the nonnative and the male over the female in our profession; the
profession has not yet been able to counter the destructive effects of
standardized tests, and in the real world of practice, many teachers learn
about the content and the format of even locally produced tests only on
the day of exam. Tests are not designed by teachers themselves but by
testing departments of language centers or institutes. Many members of
our community have not yet heard about the postmethod and have no
regard for social and critical implications of education; the urgently
needed first step, it seems, is to raise the awareness of academia. How-
ever, the academic world has the luxury of theorizing, while language
teachers have to deal with the day-to-day necessity of meeting pacing-
schedule deadlines and worrying about the pass/fail of their students at
the end of the course as a measure of their teaching efficiency.
Postmethod must become more responsible and practical to be able
to win the trust of practitioners. By responsible I mean it needs to come

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up with a teacher education system which is capable, in practice, of
overcoming the limitations within which teachers work. It must be able
to provide guidance as to how inflexible, top-down administrative sys-
tems can be convinced to grant teachers the autonomy that postmethod
demands of and accords to them.
It must also become more practical in adopting the language of prac-
tice, not academic discourse, as its point of departure. This observation
goes back to a comment made by a reviewer of an earlier draft of this
article, making a distinction between method and methodology. Method,
it was argued, is the extinct theoretical framework the postmethod has
replaced, but methodology is what teachers do in their classes, and it is very
much alive. As a result, teachers in Bell’s (2007) study have been wrong
in concluding that method is alive because they have conflated the dis-
tinction between the two concepts. But is this dichotomy part of the
discourse of practitioners? And does such a distinction really hold valid
for them? And even if this distinction does exist in the world of practice,
isn’t a teacher’s methodology highly influenced and shaped by the method
in which he or she was trained?
To come up with a postmethod pedagogy that is an accurate reflection
of what takes place in language teaching classes, an important assump-
tion must be made and accepted. Our profession must come to the
realization that no grand theory or overarching idea can capture the
local narrative of all L2 classes across time and space, and postmethod
must get its inspirations not from postmodern philosophy or academic
discussions per se, but also from the reflections of teachers and their
practical wisdom. In other words, postmethod must get into language
classes, adopt an ethnographic perspective of classroom life and reality,
and then, based on those observations and interpretations, define or
redefine its principles and pedagogies. Postmethod, in fact, must be able
to help teachers theorize their practices by including their voices in its
tenets, not speaking on their behalf from a purely theoretical perspec-
tive.
For the postmethod pedagogy to take hold, change should begin with
the academic discourse community which lays the foundations for
teacher education and certification, norms of practice, standardization
of language tests, as well as teacher hiring and firing policies. In other
words, change should be multilateral because the requirements for a
postmethod pedagogy are too demanding to be fulfilled by teachers
acting as rebels against their discourse community or their community of
practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991), which has the power to isolate them if
it does not find their discourse or practice palatable. If teachers are
going to be given a voice, they should also be given an audience to listen
to their voices, and as long as our academic discourse community ignores

650 TESOL QUARTERLY

practitioners’ plight, continues to make impossible demands, and re-
fuses to replace idealism with realism, the postmethod will remain just a
topic for lectures and argumentative academic articles like the present
one.

THE AUTHOR
Ramin Akbari is assistant professor of TEFL at Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran,
Iran. He has published on teacher education and critical pedagogy.

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