Something struck me at Harrogate, and (as things turned out) it wasn't a box of toffee. It was the suggestion that we are in the post-methodology age, writes Luke Meddings.
Now when this idea was introduced we were in the post-closing time age, and my memory of the discussion that followed is hazy. But, like a piece of toffee to one's teeth, the idea stuck.
In the old days, you knew where you were with methodology. Someone (an author or similar) or something (a Council of Europe or similar) would come up with an idea, and before too long a coursebook would appear which embodied the thinking behind it.
It was like Ali versus Frazier as the heavyweights battled it out through the 70s, the structural approach challenged by the functional-notional approach, the functional-notional approach swaying on the ropes, and Headway eventually coming into the ring like Mike Tyson to sort everyone out and unify the crown.
The methodological mood swings that accompanied all this were often resented at the less theoretically minded end of the staffroom, where the response might have been summarised as: "To hell with approaches, just give me a coursebook that works."
It was all so much newsreel and past history when I started teaching, in 1987. No one talked about the great debates which had shaped our working lives, unless it was in passing, to dismiss an unloved coursebook.
And what since then? There have been at least three developments, it seems to me, which have impacted on one might call general staffroom knowledge without being formalised so successfully by a coursebook as to become general classroom practice: learnings from the corpora, task-based learning, and the lexical approach - all of them related.
A list of other developments might include an increased interest in textual analysis, for example through a focus on discourse; and the tendency for discrete classroom techniques, such as dictogloss, to capture the imagination and work across methodology.
It is no coincidence that dictogloss lends itself as well to an examination of collocation as to one of syntax; as well to an analysis of discourse as to one of structure. It is a whole language technique.
Perhaps we have been expecting the old paradigm, in which new thinking meant a completely new approach, to prevail. Certainly there have been attempts to both reimagine (as with the Cobuild English Course) and reinvigorate (as with Cutting Edge, for example) the coursebook.
But initiatives of this sort have appeared either too radical to work in the classroom, or not radical enough to alter much of what went before.
And yet the interest in tasks, lexis and frequency remains: inchoate, but sticky.
A focus on collocation appeals to teachers as something that can be identified in context; it feels hands-on and involves everyone in the language analysis.
Frequency lists appeal as a means of gauging relevancy, and can be accessed online. They must be handled with care because of the different sources and taxonomies involved, but they can be used as reference points in your own teaching situation. Dave Willis, speaking at IATEFL, acknowledged that frequency lists represent valuable intellectual property - and undertook to post his own list for reference in due course (this site is an excellent example of the new information culture).
So it may be after all that we are in living in an age not of revolutions, but of devolution; an age in which previous experience and existing knowledge is not abruptly corralled into the service of a new system, but is gradually devolved to its users to be applied as best fits the context.
And if this is the post-methodology age, perhaps attempts to focus on the way of teaching - a philosophy of teaching, the way knowledge is applied - are not so wide of the mark.
If there is more information about language available to teachers, if there are more techniques by which text can be analysed and understood, there is surely an opportunity to be more self-sufficient in terms of our classroom ecology; more flexible at every stage of the lesson; less reliant on the delivery methods which have multiplied to include book/workbook, cassette/CD-Rom, video/DVD and Internet/PC - with computers now dispiritingly deployed to make over the language lab.
It seems to me that the only way to make sense of the new information is not to apply it in rigidly schematised ways from the outside (the spectre of the Common European Framework overlaid by grammar structures, as raised by Scott Thornbury in Harrogate), but to get inside the information and apply it from where you begin: with the immediate needs of the people in the room.
