Method vs postmethod! : a survey on prospective EFL teachers' perspectives

Abstract

This descriptive study investigated the awareness level of ELT students regarding postmethod pedagogy, and the teaching methods in Turkey. Having emerged in the early 1990s, postmethod pedagogy has received mixed reactions in the ELT world. Based on the idea that the concept of method has a limiting impact on language teachers, postmethod condition suggests that method is an artificially planted term into the language classrooms; therefore, should no longer be regarded as a viable construct. While postmethod pedagogy calls for a closer inspection of local occurrences, its presence in local curricula among countries outside the European periphery remains questionable in that the innovative condition of postmethod is fairly new, and is still widely overshadowed by Communicative Approaches in educational contexts. By employing a quantitative approach, this study traced the echoes of methods and the postmethod condition in ELT departments in Turkey Eighty-eight ELT students from six different universities in Turkey participated in the study. An online survey with four sections was employed for the data collection stages of the study. Analyses of the data revealed that the Communicative Approaches are the widely preferred methods among third- and fourth-year ELT students in Turkey. Additionally, these students had negative perceptions towards the earlier methods of teaching English. Regarding the postmethod condition, the results indicated that Turkish ELT students still had strong links with the methods, and they were unwilling to abandon the guidance that ELT methods provided them. However, significant difference was observed between teacher groups regarding the Particularity principle of the postmethod condition. The findings of this descriptive study supported the existing literature in that while Communicative Approaches are the dominant methods of instruction in Turkey, which is an English as a Foreign Language setting, some complications remain among prospective teachers in implementing deep-end ELT methods to local agenda.