Why are methods no longer the milestones of our language teaching?

[Iranian English Language Professors]

Why are methods no longer the milestones of our language teaching
journey through time? Our requiem for methods might list four possible
causes of demise:

1. Methods are too prescriptive, assuming too much about a context
before the context has even been identified. They are therefore
overgeneralized in their potential
application to practical situations.
2. Generally, methods are quite distinctive at the early, beginning
stages of a language course and rather indistinguishable from each
other at later stages. In the first few
days of a Community Language Learning class, for example, the students
witness a unique set of experiences in their small circles of
translated language whispered in their ears. But, within a matter of
weeks, such classrooms can look like any other learner-centered
curriculum.
3. It was once thought that methods could be empirically tested by
scientific
quantification to determine which one is “best.” We have now
discovered that
something as artful and intuitive as language pedagogy cannot ever be
so clearly verified by empirical validation.
4. Methods are laden with what Pennycook (1989) referred to as
“interested
knowledge” — the quasi-political or mercenary agendas of their
proponents. Recent work in the power and politics of English language
teaching (see, especially, Pennycook, 1994; Tollefson, 1995; and
Holliday, 1994) has demonstrated that methods, often the creations of
the powerful “center,” become vehicles of a “linguistic
imperialism” (Phillipson, 1992) targeting the disempowered periphery.

David Nunan (1991, p. 228) summed it up nicely:

It has been realised that there never was and probably never will be a
method for all, and the focus in recent years has been on the
development of classroom tasks and activities which are consonant with
what we know about second language acquisition, and which are also in
keeping with the dynamics of the classroom itself.