Toward a Postmethod Pedagogy

I really impressed on yesterday’s two presentations. They were well organized and helped me to understand each article deeper. However, “The concept of Method, Interested Knowledge, and the Politics of Language Teaching” (Alastair Pennycook) and “Toward a Postmethod pedagogy”(Kumaravadivelu) are still challenging for me. Kumaravadivelu states that postmethod pedagogy consists of three parameters of “particularity, practicality, and possibility.” Each parameters are connected with and influenced each other. Moreover, there parameters are based on how to treat learners, teachers and teacher educators. However, such pedagogies in Second Language Acquisition(SLA) still have many issues, including classroom strategies, instructional materials and curricular objectives. However, we reconsider the content of these pedagogies, and we will find the solutions to these issues and can educate learners, teachers and teacher educators more appropriately.

In my thought, “particularity” means that society such as school or individuals has each different level and policy. “Practicality” refers to the meaning that practitioners do their theories again and again by trial and error, balancing between theorist’s theory and teacher’s theory. Then they adjust their theories to their learners. “Possibility” accepts the different backgrounds of individuals such as nationality and culture. When I taught English in Japan, I have never seen my students from such a point of view. Most students had similar background and there was not a great gap between them like USA or other countries. According to Kumaravadivelu, he provides two interrelated aspects for learners; “academic autonomous” and “social autonomous.”(p.545) Academic autonomous is intrapersonal, while social autonomous is interpersonal. In related to academic autonomous, Kumaravadivelu requires that we, teachers, should have opportunities “ with a view to identifying learners’ learning strategies, stretching their strategies, evaluating their results, and reaching out for opportunities for additional language production.”(p.546) Also, according to social autonomous, learners should attempt “seeking their teachers’ intervention to get adequate feedback on areas, collaborating with other learners to pool information, and talking advantage of opportunities to communicate with competent speakers of the language.”(p.546-p.547) These are very agreeable and reasonable. If we, teachers, and learners try to do these attempts, it is much easier to acquire second language.

Japanese teachers evaluate students’ understanding by a lot of questionnaires and exams. They cannot give adequate feedback to students. When I teach English in Japan again, I want to communicate with students more and know what they really need. By doing so, I would like to educate students’ social autonomous attitude more.

My question is what we should do in order to develop learners’ social autonomous attitude. And is it possible that we share the ideas with our colleagues at work? If possible, how or what extend can we share our ideas?