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DIDACTIC ANALYSIS OF THE POSTMETHOD CONDITION OF B. KUMARAVADIVELU:
ECLECTICISM AND COMPLEX DIDACTICS OF LANGUAGES AND-CULTURES
by Christian PUREN
Professor emeritus of the Jean Monnet University of Saint-Étienne (France)
christian.puren@univ-st-etienne.fr
www.christianpuren.com
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................ 3
1. DIDACTIC ANALYSIS TOOLS USED ................................................................................... 4
1.1. The different methodological matrices ........................................................................ 4
1.2. The methodological and metamethodological perspectives ............................................ 4
1.3. Methodological eclecticism ........................................................................................ 6
1.4 Between practices and theories, models ...................................................................... 7
1.5. Multi- and pluri-methodological approaches ................................................................. 7
2. ANALYSIS OF THE POSITIONS AND PROPOSALS OF B. KUMARAVADIVELU ............................ 9
2.1. A project to "decolonize" international ESL teaching ..................................................... 9
2.2. A "postmethodology" perspective ............................................................................. 12
2.3. The critique of methodological eclecticism ................................................................. 16
Introduction to Chapter 2.3 ........................................................................................ 16
2.3.1. Eclecticism would be limited by the concept of “methodology” ............................... 16
2.3.2. Eclecticism would require too much teacher training ............................................. 17
2.3.3. Eclecticism would not allow the necessary coherence of practices ........................... 18
Conclusion of chapter 2.3. .......................................................................................... 21
2.4. The demand for teachers' pedagogical autonomy ....................................................... 22
2.4.1. Autonomy in the 1994 "macrostrategic framework ............................................... 22
2.4.2. Autonomy in the "postmethod pedagogy" of 2001 ................................................ 24
2.5. The two tools for empowering teachers: a "macrostrategic framework" (1994) and a
"postmethod pedagogy" (2001) ..................................................................................... 25
2.5.1. The "strategic framework" of the ten "macrostrategies" (1994), a "communicative
meta-methodology" perspective .................................................................................. 25
2.5.2. Postmethod pedagogy (B.K. 2001), a didactological perspective ............................ 28
GENERAL CONCLUSION .................................................................................................... 30
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................... 32
APPENDIX 1: "A strategic framework for L2 teaching" (B. Kumaravadilevu 1994, pp. 33-42) -
Extracts ......................................................................................................................... 36
APPENDIX 2: "Towards a postmethod pedagogy" (B. Kumaravadilevu 2001) - Extract ............. 38
Christian Puren : " Didactic analysis of the postmethod condition of B. Kumaravadivelu :
eclecticism and complex language-culture didactics"
Page 2 of 38
Abstract
Bala Kumaravadivelu Mahwah (henceforth "B.K."), a long-time professor at San Jose State
University in California, gained international recognition in 1994 with an article entitled "The
Postmethod Condition: Emerging Strategies for Second/Foreign Language Teaching," published in
TESOL Quarterly (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), a widely read journal for
teachers of English as a foreign language around the world. In this article, and in his subsequent
works, he criticizes all methodologies as being unsuitable for local cultures. His main target is the
communicative approach, dominant in international EFL teaching, as an instrument for perpetuating
American colonialism, as well as methodological eclecticism, which he considers still dependent on
constituted methodologies. Instead, he promotes the construction by teachers of coherent sets of
strategies theorized by themselves from their own situated practices.
In this long article of 40 pages, I study the evolution of B.K.'s work during his career by means of
several personal tools of analysis: the different forms of eclecticism, and their logics; the different
methodological matrices available; the methodological, didactical and didactological perspectives
of a "complex didactics of language-cultures"; the models as indispensable interfaces between
practices and theories; the multi- and pluri-methodological approaches; the characteristics of the
communication paradigm; the opposition between the optimization-substitution paradigm and the
adaptation-addition paradigm.
Although I share B.K.'s main aim, which is to give power back to teachers in the field, by considering
them as researchers of their own environments and practices, as well as many of his criticisms of
the dominant constituted methodologies, including the communicative approach, I explain in this
article my disagreement with some of his analyses and proposals, which suffer in my opinion from
two important contradictions: he promotes situated modes of teaching-learning, but he builds his
proposals on a single problematic of reference (the effects of the implementation of the
communicative approach in the teaching of international English in Third World countries); he
denounces the perverse effects of the global coherences of the constituted methodologies, but he
promotes the construction by the teachers themselves of their own methodological coherences. It
will not be surprising, finally, that I point out in B.K.'s observations, analyses, and proposals, all
the problems generated by the fact that he never situates himself within the framework of a didactic
of languages-cultures constituted as an autonomous discipline.
Initials and acronyms
B.K. : Bala Kumaravadivelu Mahwah
COE : Council of Europe / Conseil de l’Europe
DLC: Didactics of languages and cultures (« Didactique des langues-cultures »)
ESL : English as a second language
FFL : French as a foreign language (« Français langue étrangère », FLE)
Nota Bene:
–This article is translated from the French original entitled "Analyse didactique de la postmethod
condition de B. Kumaravadivelu : éclectisme et didactique complexe des langues-cultures"
(www.christianpuren.com/mes-travaux/2022b/).
–B. Kumaravadivelu's personal website unfortunately no longer in service at the time (April 2022).
Some of his work can still be downloaded from www.ResearchGate.net and www.Academia.edu, as
well as from the website of his former university, San José State University, www.sjsu.edu.
Christian Puren : " Didactic analysis of the postmethod condition of B. Kumaravadivelu :
eclecticism and complex language-culture didactics"
Page 3 of 38
INTRODUCTION
Bala Kumaravadivelu Mahwah (henceforth "B.K.") is originally from India, but for most of his career,
he has been a teacher-researcher and trainer in Applied Linguistics in the USA. In particular, he
was a professor at San Jose State University in California from 1995 until his retirement in 2018.
B.K. gained international recognition in 1994 with an article entitled "The Postmethod Condition:
Emerging Strategies for Second/Foreign Language Teaching", published in the journal TESOL
(Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), which is widely read by teachers of English as
a second language (ASL) around the world. In this article, and his subsequent works, he presents
the ins and outs of this postmethod condition, and in 1994 he proposes to non-native ESL teachers
a "strategic framework" and then in 2001 a "postmethod pedagogy" that would give them the
means to make the best use of this situation in their own interest as well as in the interest of their
learners and their countries.
The objective of my present contribution is to analyze B.K.'s positions and proposals from the point
of view of academic criticism, and with reference to a discipline that has been constituted in France
since the 1970s, the “didactique des langues-cultures” ("didactics of language and cultures",
henceforth "DLC"), as I understand it. For this reason, I will begin, in the first part, by presenting
the tools of didactic analysis that I have used for this study. In the second part, I will analyze B.K.'s
ideas by assessing their relevance to this DLC. This objective of my contribution explains - and, I
hope, will excuse in the eyes of my readers - the very high number of references to my personal
work: finally, it is indeed the whole of my conception of the DLC discipline that I had to mobilize
here to confront it with the one that seemed to me to emerge from B.K.'s work that I could consult.
These works are the articles or chapters of collective works available for download on his personal
site until April, 2022
1
. My sources are therefore partial; they do not include, in particular, the four
personal works that B.K. announces in the Books section of his site. Nevertheless, I will speak here
of B.K.'s "works", making the hypothesis that he has chosen to make freely available the texts that
present the essence of his ideas
2
. What certainly does not seem to me to be questioned in B.K.'s
other texts - it is important to point this out now because it has chain consequences in the
elaboration of his positions and proposals - is that this author is initially only interested in the
methodology of the international teaching of English, namely a communicative approach that he
considers instrumentalized by the Western countries of English language, and especially the USA,
to maintain their colonial domination. I do not question the accuracy of this observation, nor the
relevance of his struggle, nor the didactic interest of his proposals within the limited historical and
geographical frameworks he has thus given himself. But these frameworks and his militant
commitment lead him to questionable analyses and proposals from the point of view of the general
didactics of language-cultures: neither his "macrostrategic framework" nor his "postmethod
pedagogy" can be transposed as such to the teaching of foreign languages in Europe, any more
than the American communicative approach, whose imposition on other countries he rightly
denounces.
As will be seen, I do not share many of B.K.'s criticisms of language teaching methodologies, and
I have strong reservations about the idea of the postmethod condition. His 1994 article appeared
the same year as my Essai sur l’éclectisme (Puren 1994e). He criticizes eclecticism, whereas I
analyze it as an empirical but positive response of teachers and textbook authors to the complexity
of didactic problems. He judges that all past methodologies have been useless, whereas in my
opinion, even if they have produced perverse effects by functioning as "systems for constructing
certainties and servitudes"
3
, they have represented an effort to adapt to new objectives, audiences,
models and environments, and have thus enriched disciplinary reflection and the available teaching
1
With the sole exception of a lengthy interview published in English and Spanish in an international didactic
journal for teachers of Spanish as a foreign language, MarcoELE (see B.K. 2012b).
2
It is possible, however, that I have missed some important ideas. On this point, see note 25, p. 16.
3
This is one of the major conclusions I draw at the end of my Histoire des méthodologies de l’enseignement
des langues (1988a, p. 263), taking up a beautiful formula of Robert Galisson.
Christian Puren : " Didactic analysis of the postmethod condition of B. Kumaravadivelu :
eclecticism and complex language-culture didactics"
Page 4 of 38
tools; he considers that they are all to be rejected, whereas I think that they are part of the
historical heritage of the profession, and that as such they should not only be known, but exploited.
1. DIDACTIC ANALYSIS TOOLS USED
I have limited myself in this first part to the tools I used in the second part to analyze B.K.'s work,
while announcing, at the end of each of his chapters, the main criticism that it allows me to make
of his positions and proposals. All these criticisms can be summed up, in the end, in the fact that
B.K. does not clearly situate himself in the framework of a constituted discipline, with its constitutive
problematic and perspectives, and with its history. But the content of my criticisms is of course
determined by my own conception of this discipline, which I have long proposed to call "complex
didactics of language-cultures", and of which I published a manifesto in 2003 (Puren 2003b).
1.1. The different methodological matrices
The "constituted methodologies" ("methodologies", in the rest of this article) are historical systems
claiming to give coherent answers to all the questions concerning the modes of teaching, the modes
of learning and the modes of relating these two processes. Four methodologies have emerged since
the end of the 19th century in France: (1) the direct and active methodology of the 1920s-1960s,
which was the official methodology in French school teaching throughout this period and the
dominant methodology in French as a foreign language (FFL) teaching; (2) the communicative
approach, from the 1970s to the 1990s; (3) the plurilingual and pluricultural methodologies, since
the 1990s; and (4) the actional approach, since the 2000s. Each of these methodologies emerged
at a time when the social objective, the social situation and the targeted competences in language
and culture changed, and they differed from the others in the specific models used to develop them
- in the case of all methodologies, the pedagogical, linguistic, cognitive and cultural models
dominant at the time - while borrowing certain methodological models from the preceding
methodologies. The elaboration of a new methodology consists in mobilizing these different models
to define and organize the learning action (the "school tasks") according to the use action (the
"social actions") for which one wants to prepare the learners. Once the process has been completed,
all the elements that contributed to it constitute a new "didactic configuration".
4
I consider that all these methodologies are currently relevant, either globally, as matrices that can
be adapted to certain objectives, audiences and didactic environments, or partially, when one
selects components of different methodologies to articulate, integrate or combine them. On this
point, my position is in radical opposition to that of B.K., who considers that eclecticism does not
allow for coherent classroom practices, and who does not question at the outset (in his 1994 article)
the universalist claims of the communicative approach.
1.2. The methodological and metamethodological perspectives
The discipline of Didactics of languages and cultures (DLC) emerged in France at the end of the
XIXe century, to reach its maturity in the 1980s, by successively applying twice the same process
of complexification, namely the "passage to the meta": this consists, when one has progressed in
the knowledge of one's object to the point where one is no longer able to apprehend it by only one
glance from the position where one is, to take a position of distance in order to be able to observe
it once again in its totality.
(1) The reflections and proposals concerning language teaching started from the methodological
perspective, which remained the only one in force until the 1960s: until then, the best answers in
absolute terms were sought to the questions concerning the modes of teaching, which were
perceived as problems that could receive definitive solutions, and all these solutions were grouped
together in a "method" or "methodology" conceived in a single global coherence that was considered
permanent and universal.
4
For the different didactic configurations, see Puren 029, with its notes and bibliography. For two examples
of the process of elaboration of didactic configurations (the direct configuration and the active configuration),
cf. Puren 2012f, pp. 6-12.
Christian Puren : " Didactic analysis of the postmethod condition of B. Kumaravadivelu :
eclecticism and complex language-culture didactics"
Page 5 of 38
(2) A first shift to the meta -to a "meta-methodological" or "didactic" perspective- took place at the
beginning of the 1970s: the various possible answers to methodological questions were still being
sought, but they were now perceived as problems that could only be managed according to the
different objectives, audiences and environments by means of solutions that were necessarily
partial, local and provisional
5
. The discipline of "didactics (of languages and cultures)" was built on
this didactic perspective, and for this reason it has taken on this name, which it has retained until
now. Two metamethodological perspectives already existed, but they were external to the teaching-
learning of languages because they were borrowed from two other disciplines, namely pedagogy,
dominant in the teaching of modern foreign languages in schools, and applied linguistics, dominant
in the teaching of French as a foreign language (FFL) to adults.
The didactic perspective is therefore by nature a metamethodological perspective within the
discipline of DLC. The "field" of the didactic perspective, within the discipline of didactics (of
language-cultures), is constituted by all the extra-methodological positions from which it is possible
to problematize the methodological questions: on the design side, these are the objectives, the
environments (of which the actors themselves are part, in the very broad sense of the concept, the
one it has in ecology) as well as all the models available in the different fields concerned, those of
linguistics, cognition, cultural anthropology and pedagogy, as well as the methodology itself, if one
mobilizes for these problematization methodologies or methodological components already
constituted.
6
When we place ourselves in the methodological perspective, we are looking for
answers; when we place ourselves in the didactic perspective, we are looking for a maximum of
questions and possible contextual answers, in order to give the teachers the means to choose their
own questions and to bring their own answers, and even, beyond that, to construct their own
questioning; in methodology, we construct, in didactics, we deconstruct in order to give teachers
the means to build their own constructions on their own ground, and this didactic deconstruction
naturally concerns all methodologies, so as to enrich the construction materials available to
teachers, and the ways of using them.
(3) A second shift to the meta, to a "meta-didactic" perspective, therefore, takes place in the early
1980s, with the emergence of ethical, epistemological and ideological questions that are imposed
as soon as didactic questions are in turn perceived as problematic. This is the case, for example,
when one seeks to answer questions of language policy, school curriculum development, or teacher
training as autonomous professionals and responsible citizens. This third perspective within DLC,
the "didactological" perspective, historically completes its disciplinary maturation
7
.
What characterizes this mature discipline, which I call the "complex didactics of language-cultures"
(cf. Puren 2003b), is the maintenance of a permanent recursion between its three constitutive
perspectives:
In my 1999a article, in which I present the functioning of these three internal perspectives, I explain
what the didactic perspective brings to teachers as follows:
5
On the epistemological difference between the notion of "problem" and "problematic," cf. Puren 023. On the
notion of "methodological components", or "methodological objects", cf. infra the beginning of chapter 1.5 and
my reference that is indicated, Puren 2019b.
6
On the intervention side, which is the second major type of activity in DLC, these are materials, practices
and evaluation. For a schematization of this whole field of didactics and its illustration by two mental
experiences, see Puren 044.
7
To designate this new metadidactic perspective, I have taken up the term proposed by Robert Galisson in
the 1980s to designate what appeared to him at the time as a new discipline, which he called "didactology".
On this whole historical evolution of DLC in France from the 1960s to the 1980s, see Puren 1994a. On the
characteristic activities of each of these three perspectives constituting the discipline DLC, see Puren 002.
Christian Puren : " Didactic analysis of the postmethod condition of B. Kumaravadivelu :
eclecticism and complex language-culture didactics"
Page 6 of 38
The methodological level
8
remained for a long time in DLC - exactly as long as it remained
the only one constituted - a field of predilection of a dogmatic and restrictive type of training,
whether in reference to practical models (among the so-called "field" trainers and inspectors)
or in reference to theoretical models (among linguists and applied psychologists). From the
didactic level, which by definition integrates in particular the historical and comparative
perspective, it is now possible to make this first methodological level, in the same way as
the other two, a field of fundamental reflection where teachers can find tools for analysis
and personal construction of their own practices. (pp. 38-39)
In his first publications, B.K. adopted a methodological perspective: all you had to do was read the
titles of these articles in the "Articles" section of his (now defunct) website. There was a 1993 article
on the communicative approach: "Maximizing learning potential in the communicative classroom",
which he will quote, under the reference 1993a, in a passage of his 1994 article (cf. the last
quotation in chapter 1.3.). We will see further on in chapter 2.5. that with his "strategic framework"
of 1994 and his "postmethod pedagogy" of 2001, B.K. moves to the didactic perspective and then
to the didactological perspective. But one of the weaknesses, it seems to me, of all his proposals is
that they are not situated within the framework of a constituted discipline functioning on the
principle of recursivity between its three internal perspectives.
1.3. Methodological eclecticism
From the beginning of the 1970s, some French specialists proposed to elaborate a "reasoned
eclecticism", which corresponded to the transition to the didactic perspective. In a 1972 collective
work, three specialists in the teaching of ESL wrote:
Let us repeat, the solution of the future can only be eclectic, in the positive and not pejorative
sense that Palmer gave to eclecticism: "So far from being a term of disparagement or
reproach it implies the deliberate choice of all things which are good, a judicious and
reasoned selection of all the diverse factors the sum of which may constitute a complete
and homogeneous system". What we might call a "reasoned eclecticism" must govern both
the choice of linguistic and psychological theories on which we want to base our experiments
and the choice of means and techniques to be used in conducting the experiment (Antier,
Girard & Hardin 1972, p. 76).
One of the three authors of the above-mentioned collective work, Denis Girard, published in the
same year 1972 a personal book entitled Linguistique appliquée et didactique des langues, in which
he explains its title as follows:
Language teaching, long considered an art, has evolved considerably during this century
and has already acquired, in the best of cases, a certain scientific rigor. It was perhaps a
mistake to try to make it a sort of by-product of linguistics by labeling it "Applied linguistics".
[... ] (Girard, 1972 : 27)
And he continues a few pages later with this proposal, which will be imposed in France during this
decade: "Why not speak of Didactics of language', as W. F. Mackey does?" (p. 9 & 27)
9
.
In my Essai sur l’éclectisme (Puren 1994e), I analyzed eclecticism, whose rise in French as a foreign
language textbooks had been noticeable since the early 1980s, as an empirical response by
8
Since that article, I have replaced the term "level" in my terminology, which connoted the idea of a
hierarchical relationship, with "perspective". As I wrote in the presentation of this article, "the superiority of
analysis in complex didactics is given only by the constant chaining of the three perspectives, the superiority
of analysis being given only by the constant chaining of the three perspectives, just like the passage from one
perspective to another, in the physical world, which allows one to apprehend the complexity of an object by
spinning it between one's fingers or by turning around it."
9
D. Girard refers to William Francis MACKEY's 1961 book, Language Teaching Analisis, which had just been
translated into French with the title Principes de didactique analytique. Analyse scientifique de l'enseignement
des langues (Paris: Didier, 1972, 713 p.).
Christian Puren : " Didactic analysis of the postmethod condition of B. Kumaravadivelu :
eclecticism and complex language-culture didactics"
Page 7 of 38
teachers to the complexity with which they are constantly confronted in their daily practices. The
same observation was made by K.B. the same year in his 1994 article:
Furthermore, as the study conducted by Swaffar, Arens, and Morgan (1982) revealed, even
syllabus designers and textbook producers do not strictly follow the underlying philosophy
of a given method, and more importantly, even teachers who are trained in and claim to
follow a particular method do not fully conform to its theoretical principles and classroom
procedures (see also Kumaravadivelu, 1993a). (K.B. 1994, p. 30)
But unlike B.K., who limited himself to a critique of eclecticism, in my subsequent work I proposed
to take it into account within a complex DLC, that is to say within the framework of the recursivity
of the three internal disciplinary perspectives.
1.4 Between practices and theories, models
Long before Denis Girard, Émile Durkheim had distanced himself from the traditional conception of
teaching as an "art". In his 1922 book Education and Sociology, he noted that pedagogical
reflections "take the form of theories; they are combinations of ideas, not combinations of acts,
and, in this way, they are close to science. But the ideas which are thus combined have for an
object, not to express the nature of the given things, but to direct the action" (p. 88), in what
according to him they approach art. And he finally proposed to consider them as being of the same
nature as "political, strategic, etc. medical theories". To express the mixed character of these kinds
of speculations, we propose to call them practical theories. Pedagogy is a practical theory of this
kind" (p. 89).
What Durkheim means by this paradoxical expression of "practical theory" is what B.K. calls
"classroom-oriented theories of practice" (1994, p. 29), and it is what epistemologists now call
"models" in the sense that they give to this notion when it comes to the products of systemic
modeling. But B.K. does not think of his "theories of practice" as systemic models. The complexity
and epistemological specificity of the teaching profession are that they cannot be thought of as a
direct application of a set of established practices, nor as a direct application of external theories:
the only way out of the eternal and insoluble problem of the "theory-practice relationship" is to
resort to those indispensable interfaces between theories and practices that are models. Models
are concrete enough to generate practices, but abstract enough so that these practices can be
diversified according to the audiences, objectives and teaching-learning environments
10
.
There are a great many models that have been bequeathed to us by the different historical
methodologies, of different formats - micro, meso and macro-methodological - and of different
types - practical, praxeological, theoretical and didactological, according to their different origins
and functions
11
.
One of the weaknesses of B.K.'s positions and proposals is that he remains at the sterile opposition
theory-practice, so that he only envisages, in order to fight against the domination of the
"theorists", to make all the didactic reflection and intervention start from the teaching practices
alone, which is only passing from one type of limitation to another.
1.5. Multi- and pluri-methodological approaches
The two multi- and pluri-methodological approaches are already emerging in empirical eclecticism
from the 1970s onwards in France. They have been developed recently from a DLC point of view
by Bruno Maurer in part 5 of Maurer & Puren 2019, and by me in Puren 2020f
12
.
10
On the issue of models in DLC, cf. e.g., with their respective bibliographies, Puren 2015a and, in Spanish,
2019i-es. The title of this chapter 1.4. takes up the subtitle of the latter text, which is entitled "La didáctica
en la formación del profesor: entre las teorías y las prácticas, los modelos".
11
On the different model formats, cf. Puren 2019g. On the different types, cf. 2020a.
12
These two texts refer, of course, to references from other didacticians.
Christian Puren : " Didactic analysis of the postmethod condition of B. Kumaravadivelu :
eclecticism and complex language-culture didactics"
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These two types of approaches are based on the idea, which I have already touched upon in chapter
1.1 above, of the current availability of different methodological matrices provided by the various
language teaching methodologies that have succeeded one another since the end of the XIXe
century in France, as well as on the idea, validated by the analysis of the evolution of these
methodologies, of the existence of components of these methodologies that are sufficiently
coherent and self-sufficient to have been "copied and pasted" from one constituted methodology
to another. These components, today as in the past, can also be inserted as they are by teachers
into their own methodological "software". I have proposed to call these components methodological
"objects", from a term used by computer scientists, who speak of "Object-oriented programming"
(00P) when they interpose already written parts of software into the new software they are creating.
These software components are available in "object libraries" that are available to computer
scientists. The same is true of "methodological objects", which are available to language-culture
teachers: these include, for example, the "direct" techniques (i.e., in L2) for explaining an unknown
word, the active and comprehensive approach to texts, the experiential techniques, the standard
exercise procedure, or the five documentary logics (cf. Puren 2019g). Some of these methodological
components are so robust, effective, and self-sufficient that they can be found added to all
methodologies constituted since traditional methodology included: these are the "experiential
techniques," which propose to "make students experience" the foreign language in the classroom,
and for this purpose solicit "the authentic, the spontaneous, the lived, the affective, the emotional,
the pleasurable, the trusting, the convivial, the imaginative, the creative, the playful, the relational,
the interactive, the corporeal" (Puren 052, p. 4).
I recently proposed (Puren 073, November 2020) the following definitions of multi- and pluri-
methodological approaches, which I believe are at work in the construction of the corresponding
methodologies:
A "multi-methodological" approach is one in which different methodologies are simply
juxtaposed without even being articulated, for example from one teaching sequence to
another or from one year to another. [...]
A "pluri-methodological" approach is a system designed to "articulate", "integrate" or
"combine" several methodologies, i.e. to manage them in such a way as to bring them into
synergy within the same overall coherence. (p. 2)
The distinction brought to these two approaches by the prefixes multi- and pluri- is homologous to
the one that the authors of the CEFRL, with the same prefixes, attribute to the notions of
"multilingual/multicultural" and "plurilingual/pluricultural": the multi- is of the order of
juxtaposition, the pluri- emerges when the different languages and the different cultures enter into
synergy and are integrated into a new global coherence:
[…] the plurilingual approach emphasises the fact that as an individual person’s experience
of language in its cultural contexts expands, from the language of the home to that of
society at large and then to the languages of other peoples (whether learnt at school or
college, or by direct experience), he or she does not keep these languages and cultures in
strictly separated mental compartments, but rather builds up a communicative
competence to which all knowledge and experience of language contributes and in which
languages interrelate and interact. [...] (COE 2001, p. 5)
[…] the various cultures (national, regional, social) to which that person has gained access
do not simply co-exist side by side; they are compared, contrasted and actively interact to
produce an enriched, integrated pluricultural competence, of which plurilingual competence
is one component, again interacting with other components. (COE 2001, p. 6)
Because he situates himself in the sole framework of the communicative approach in his 1994
article, refusing any form of eclecticism, and then rejecting the very idea of "methodology" in his
2001 article, B.K. cannot consider the relevance of these multi- and plurimethodological
approaches.
Christian Puren : " Didactic analysis of the postmethod condition of B. Kumaravadivelu :
eclecticism and complex language-culture didactics"
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2. ANALYSIS OF THE POSITIONS AND PROPOSALS OF B. KUMARAVADIVELU
The first three chapters of this second part focus on B.K.'s positions: his "postmethod" perspective,
his critique of eclecticism, and his promotion of teacher pedagogical autonomy. The last two
chapters focus on his two successive proposals, a "macrostrategic framework" (1994) and a
"postmethod pedagogy" (2001).
2.1. A project to "decolonize" international ESL teaching
Originally from India, B.K. did all of his college education there; he began his teaching career at
the university there; and even though he spent most of his career in the US, he has always
maintained a keen awareness of being a non-native English teacher, and a strong solidarity with
all those countries, like India, in which he considers that the Western English-speaking
countries -that is, if you count England, the US, English-speaking Canada, and Australia- are
imposing a mode and content of English teaching that is inappropriate to those other countries and
their teachers. Using critical geopolitical terminology, he calls these countries the "Periphery" and
the "Center"
13
.
But his criticisms are in fact aimed primarily at the United States, the only country to which he
clearly refers when he speaks of "the Empire". In a very politically committed article with very anti-
American overtones (« Dangerous Liaison: Globalization, Empire and TESOL”, 2006), he thus takes
up from a quoted author the equation Globalization = Westernization = Americanization.
In this 2006 article, after recalling the 2003 invasion of Iraq as an illustration of U.S. imperialism,
he cites among other criticisms those made by TESOL Islamia
14
denouncing the neo-colonial
orientation of TESOL International's activities "in the area of language policy, curriculum design,
materials development, language testing, teaching methodology, program evaluation, and second
language research" (B.K. 2006, p. 14). The only thing missing from this list is the area of teacher
education, but that is probably an oversight, because he has often discussed it elsewhere (at great
length, for example, in his 2001 article, and again in his 2012 article).
We know the difference between the "postcolonial" critique, in which it is considered that the
political independence of the colonized countries opened a new era (B.K. still uses this concept in
the title of an article from 2005), and the "decolonial" critique, in which it is considered that
colonialism has continued until today under new forms of domination, those of the international
networks of economic, political, ideological and cultural power. For B.K. and the many authors he
cites in this regard, one of the instruments for perpetuating this domination is the international
teaching of English, including its methodology, which he considers a "colonial construction": he
denounces the methodological manipulation that comes with center-based methods (B.K. 2012b,
p. 7), in particular by means of the native teacher model, which imposes a monolingual approach,
as well as a mono-cultural approach with a Western worldview and mode of communication.
15
What B.K. calls a "colonization of English language teaching" in the countries of the Periphery
endangers, according to him, the linguistic and cultural identity of the learners, and it is even likely
13
Regarding B.K.'s education and career, I refer to the detailed information he himself provides on his personal
website, still online even though it is no longer updated since his retirement in 2018,
www.bkumaravadivelu.com.
14
http://cqcounter.com/site/tesolisla mia.org.html (last consulted April 2022). As the name suggests, the
project of the site's managers is to establish a close relationship between the teaching of English and Islam.
15
Ayachia (2016) presents as self-evident the idea, which he supports with references to B.K. and other
authors, that "the rejection of translation in the method era was illegitimate and it was a result of the method
concept as a colonial construct." Such a statement is for me an example of purely ideological reasoning. This
rejection of translation was originally built on pedagogical arguments at the end of the XIXe century for the
teaching of school languages in Europe, well before American behaviourism, and it was only afterwards that
it could be eventually exploited for the benefit of colonialist domination.
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to provoke, in countries where English is the national second language (as in India, precisely), a
real collective acculturation.
The intercultural approach, which historically came to be grafted onto the communicative language
approach to manage the cultural side of language-culture teaching, restores the balance between
the foreign culture and the culture of the learners to some extent, but it seems to him insufficient
16
:
While the world at large seems to be treating English as a vehicle for global communication,
a sizable segment of the TESOL profession continues to be informed by an anachronistic
anthropological belief in the inextricability of the language–culture connection. TESOL
textbooks continue to use the English language as a cultural carrier. There are instances
where academic papers presented at professional conferences propagate an ethnocentric
view of culture learning and culture teaching (Kumaravadivelu, 2002). Even textbooks on
intercultural communication, with very few exceptions, still treat Western cultural practices
as the communicational norm for intercultural communication across the globe. (B.K. 2006,
p. 19)
And he calls for the "epistemic break"
17
necessary, in the conception of language teaching-learning
and in the corresponding research, to achieve a radical reappropriation of English language teaching
from the point of view of the "historical, political, cultural, and educational requirements" of these
different countries (B.K. 2012, p. 24).
Most French, and no doubt European, didacticians will certainly be surprised, as I was, to see their
postulate of the indissociability of language and culture treated as an "anachronistic anthropological
belief". It is certainly important to remember that, as B.K. denounces, language can be a formidable
instrument of acculturation: European countries like France, which have a long colonial history,
know this well. But we can oppose B.K. with the following three objections:
(1) What he wants to see is in fact that a certain language is dissociated from a certain culture so
that other cultures can be associated with it. However, this project does not call into question, but
rather tends to reinforce the idea of an indissociability of language and culture. In his 2001 article,
B.K. quotes the following passage from Weedon (1987):
language is the place where actual and possible forms of social organization and their likely
social and political consequences are defined and contested. Yet it is also the place where
our sense of ourselves, our subjectivity, is constructed (p. 21). (Quoted in B.K. 2001, p.
543)
And B.K. continues, “This is even more applicable to L2 education, which brings languages and
cultures in contact.” (p. 534)
(2) The intercultural approach aims to modify the learners' representations of the foreign culture,
but "with very few exceptions", to use B.K.'s formula (2016, p. 74), it has in fact only given rise in
textbooks to a metacultural comparative approach, i.e. an explicit comparison between foreign
cultures and the learners' own cultures. It is this approach, which he calls "multicultural", that B.K.
proposes, but, like the two authors he quotes in the following passage, it is limited to the cultures
of teachers and learners:
Raising cultural consciousness minimally requires that instead of privileging the teacher as
the sole cultural informant, we treat the learner as a cultural informant as well. By treating
learners as cultural informants, we can encourage them to engage in a process of
participation that puts a premium on their power/knowledge. We can do so by identifying
the cultural knowledge learners bring to the classroom by using it to help them share their
16
In this regard, B.K. cites in his 2012 article a well-known author among European language-culture
educators, Michael BYRAM, and his 1997 book, Teaching and assessing intercultural communicative
competence (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters).
17
Cf. the subtitle of his 2012 text: The Case For an Epistemic Break.
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eclecticism and complex language-culture didactics"
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own individual perspectives with the teacher as well as other learners whose lives, and hence
perspectives, differ from theirs (Swaffar, 1991; Walters, 1992). We can do so by taking our
learners on the path of "cultural versatility" if we "structure tasks and assignments so as to
... elicit a synthesis between learner, the learner's home culture, and the target cultural
objective" (Robinson, 1991, p. 118). Such a multicultural approach can also dispel
stereotypes that create and sustain cross-cultural misunderstandings and
miscommunications. (B.K. 1994, p. 41, emphasis added)
I personally do not see why this comparative meta-cultural approach should not also include, at
least in the teaching of English in schools, the cultures of Western English-speaking countries,
precisely in order to give students the means to develop a critical vision of them. To omit American
culture from this teaching - since it is concretely what B.K. is talking about - at least in the countries
where it is massively diffused, is to deprive oneself of an effective means of fighting against
acculturation. One also wonders more generally why the strategy proposed by B.K. would be valid
for other cultures that do not present a risk of acculturation for students. One of the weaknesses
of B.K.'s positions and proposals is that they are difficult to generalize, because he never questions
their validity for other audiences, other institutional environments, and other languages.
(3) B.K. rightly points out the inadequacy of the intercultural approach, but he fails to see what is
the cause of this, namely that this intercultural approach has inherited the characteristics of the
communicative approach because it has historically been placed at the service of the same social
objective of reference
18
. Replacing the Western culture of communication with local cultures of
communication cannot produce this "epistemic rupture" that B.K. advocates: to achieve this, it is
necessary to question the exclusivity of the intercultural component within cultural competence at
the same time as the exclusivity of the communicative component within language competence.
But B.K. cannot question intercultural competence because he does not question the language
objective of communicative competence, and this is why he proposes the only other solution, radical
and debatable, namely the impasse on the cultures of Western English-speaking countries (cf. the
paragraph above). From the point of view of a DLC that is open to the whole history of
methodologies, the language-culture relationship always appears to be indissociable because it is
thought of in a complex way in the diversity of the components of language competence and in the
diversity of the components of cultural competence: these are the relations between the
comprehension and meta-cultural components in the active methodology, the communicative and
intercultural components in the communicative approach, the plurilingual and pluricultural
components in the plurilingual-pluricultural methodologies, and the co-language and co-cultural
components in the action-oriented perspective.
19
While up until 2006 B.K. had published exactly half of the articles referenced on his site in the
journal TESOL (8 out of 16), it is not until 2016 that we find another one, which will be the last,
where his stances are just as critical and militant, as its very title suggests: "The Decolonial Option
in English Teaching". The author of B.K.'s "profile" on his personal website notes that he had a
reputation among his students as a “thoughtful, and always thought-provoking guide”: although
he was awarded emeritus status at his California university upon retirement, it is likely that
elsewhere he paid for the radicalness of his political and ideological stances with a certain
marginalization.
I personally feel close to these positions of B.K. and to his direct way of taking them, as can be
seen in the criticisms that for twenty years now, together with some other colleagues, I have been
addressing to the experts of the Language Policy Unit of the Council of Europe and their proposals
in terms of the linguistic policy as well as of teaching, learning and evaluation of languages and
18
Cf. Puren 2017h, slides #27 and #28. The same "service relationship," which partly explains the lack of
consideration of intercultural competence in communicative textbooks, can be found in the scales of mediation
competence in the CEFR Companion volume published in 2018 (COE 2018): cf. Puren 2019b, p. 57
19
On the different components of cultural competence, see Puren 2011j. On these different relationships
between the cultural components of cultural competence and the language components of language
competence, cf. Puren 052, diagram p. 2.
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eclecticism and complex language-culture didactics"
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cultures
20
. It seems to me, however, that B.K. does not sufficiently remind us of the particularity
of his field of intervention in relation to other countries, other languages and other learning publics,
and that his methodological proposals are not generalizable because they are too narrowly limited
to the teaching that he criticizes.
2.2. A "postmethodology" perspective
B.K.'s analysis of the current situation of teaching English as an international language seems to
him to provide a way out of what he denounces as a neo-colonial "methodological manipulation".
He announces this at the very beginning of his 1994 article:
In practical terms, the postmethod condition signifies several possibilities for redefining the
relationship between the center and the periphery. First and foremost, it signifies a search
for an alternative to method rather than an alternative method. (B.K. 1994, p. 29)
In the expression postmethod condition, the term method has for B.K. the restricted meaning of
"constituted methodology"
21
. His criticisms concern all methodologies as such. It is with them that
he begins his 1994 article, whose tone is immediately very incisive:
After swearing by a succession of fashionable language teaching methods and dangling them
before a bewildered flock of believers, we seem to have suddenly slipped into a period of
robust reflection. [...] In the past few years, we have seen a steady stream of evaluative
thoughts on the nature and scope of method [that] counsel us against the search for the
best method and indeed against the very concept of method itself. This awareness is fast
creating what might be called a postmethod condition. (B.K. 1994, pp. 27-28)
To translate condition into French, I think it is necessary to use the same term. It is the one used
by François Lyotard in his famous 1979 book, La condition postmoderne. Admittedly, this French
philosopher is not cited in the texts of B.K. that I have been able to consult; in a 2012 text, he
even distances himself from postmodernism, which he presents on the basis of a work by the
American sociologist Harvie Ferguson, because he considers it to have been overtaken in turn by
globalization (B.K. 2012a). But the analogy is too strong, between B.K.'s critique of methodologies
and F. Lyotard's critique of ideologies, all of which function according to the two authors as great
systems of unique, closed and universal coherence, not to justify the use of this term.
The most accurate French translation of the Postmethod condition seems to me to be, therefore,
"la condition post-méthodologies".
22
The first reason for B.K.'s opposition to all methodologies comes from his project to decolonize
international English education.
[...center-based methods and center-produced materials are all the time imposed on the
Periphary. Constructing a context-specific postmethod pedagogy is one way of countering
the methodological manipulation that come with Center-based methods. (2012b, p. 7)
But he is really only targeting the instrumentalization by the USA in some countries of a particular
methodology, the communicative approach. He does not give any other historical examples in his
work, and the generalization he makes in the above quotation is hardly risky, because it is a simple
truism: by nature and by definition, a methodology is "centralist" when it is imposed by a few on
many... and vice versa. The most frequent case, as far as I know, and which concerns the majority
of language teachers in the world, is the imposition on these teachers by the educational authorities
of their country of pedagogical and methodological orientations chosen, as well as sometimes of
20
See bibliographic references cited in 2e paragraph of the general introduction to Maurer & Puren 2019, p. 1
(book freely downloadable online).
21
The French term "méthode" is also used in DLC in the sense of didactic material (e.g., "les méthodes
d'anglais publiées en Espagne") and of a minimal unit of methodological coherence (e.g., the "méthode
déductive", the "méthode onomasiologique"): cf. Puren 004.
22
I have retained in the present English translation this remark that I made in the French original.
Christian Puren : " Didactic analysis of the postmethod condition of B. Kumaravadivelu :
eclecticism and complex language-culture didactics"
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textbooks elaborated, according to national aims and objectives. These are more complex situations
to analyze and to denounce, because these orientations and textbooks are instruments without
there always being "instrumentalization", and because it is a question of local relations of
hierarchical authority, and not of foreign domination.
When he criticizes methodologies in general, B.K.'s assertions are often questionable, because his
focus on the communicative approach alone does not give him sufficient historical or geographical
distance. I will take as an example the following passage, which I will analyze in detail.
Not anchored in any specific learning and teaching context, and caught up in the whirlwind
of fashion, methods tend to wildly drift from one theoretical extreme to the other. At one
time, grammatical drills were considered the right way to teach; at another, they were given
up in favor of communicative tasks. At one time, explicit error correction was considered
necessary; at another, it was frowned upon. These extreme swings create conditions in
which certain aspects of learning and teaching get overly emphasized while certain others
are utterly ignored, depending on which way the pendulum swings. (B.K. 2003b, pp. 28-
29).
Here are a few remarks that this passage suggests to me:
a) Each methodology, in fact, emerges and is constructed by being strongly "embedded in a specific
learning and teaching context". In his 1994 article, p. 32, B.K. proposes ensuring “social relevance"
as one of ten macrostrategies from which teachers can develop their own methodology, which will
be made up of all the corresponding microstrategies:
Macrostrategy 10: Ensure social relevance
Social relevance refers to the need for teachers to be sensitive to the societal, political,
economic, and educational environment in which L2 learning/teaching takes place. [...]
L2 learning/ teaching is not a discrete activity; it is deeply embedded in the larger societal
context that has a profound effect on it. The social context shapes various learning/teaching
issues such as the motivation for L2 learning, the goal of L2 learning, the functions an L2 is
expected to perform at home and in the community, the availability of input to the learner,
the variation in the input, and the norms of proficiency acceptable to that particular speech
community. (B.K. 1994, p. 42)
But this is precisely the mechanism at the historical origin of each transition from one methodology
to another: a new methodology begins to be constituted when the current one has lost its social
relevance due to the evolution of society (cf. the examples of direct and active methodology in
Puren 2012f, pp. 6-12, already cited above note 4 p. 3, regarding the notion of "didactic
configuration"). The inadequacy of the communicative approach in some countries, rightly
denounced by B.K., comes precisely from the fact that its original environment of elaboration –the
Western English-speaking countries– is not the same as that of these other countries. But
conversely, the fact that these countries have imported not only the American communicative
approach but also the corresponding social, pedagogical and communicative cultures and have
maintained it in their school systems for so long until now cannot be explained solely by a neo-
colonial external imposition or by collective alienation: it necessarily responds in part to the aims
and objectives that these countries have sovereignly set for themselves for the teaching of English.
In other words –those of B.K.– it necessarily has a certain degree of "social relevance". It also has
a certain degree of didactic relevance: there is the educational environment of the teachers, which
B.K. rightly talks about, but there are also the educational aims of foreign language teaching in
schools, among which the discovery of foreign cultures cannot be excluded. The fact that other
languages are offered in parallel with English, each one taught with its corresponding culture(s),
also modifies the evaluation that can be made of a country's educational policy with regard to the
teaching of language-cultures.
To fit all his analyses into his scheme of the Center versus Periphery domination relation, B.K.
extends it to the theory/theorists versus practice/practitioners relation:
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As conceptualizers of philosophical underpinnings governing language pedagogy, theorizers
have traditionally occupied the power center of language pedagogy while the practitioners
of classroom teaching have been relegated to the disempowered periphery. If the
conventional concept of method entitles theorizers to construct knowledge-oriented theories
of pedagogy, the postmethod condition empowers practitioners to construct classroom-
oriented theories of practice. (B.K. 1994, pp. 28-29)
But methodologies are not only the work of theorists. While some are partly applications of theories,
others, such as direct and active methodology, are empirical in origin, with theories subsequently
legitimizing the choices made by practitioners. Even methodologies that refer very strongly to
certain theories from the outset integrate, during their initial development phase, taking into
account the experiments in the field, and sometimes even a long period of practical experience by
many teachers. In the French audiovisual methodology of the 1960s-1970s, for example, the
influence of experimental teachers, all trained in direct and active methodology, was much more
decisive than the verbo-tonal theory of Petar Guberina (cf. Puren 1988a, p. 211). Another example:
at the origin of the active methodology, dominant for half a century in French school teaching, from
the 1920s to the 1960s, there is a revolt of teachers against the authoritarian and dogmatic
imposition by the Ministry of National Education of the direct methodology, which some of them at
the time had denounced as a "pedagogical coup d'état" (Puren 1988a, pp. 63-64). And this active
methodology developed progressively and empirically during the years 1900-1920 on the basis of
a principle that one of its promoters, Auguste Pinloche, presented thus in 1909:
There is not and cannot be an absolute system in pedagogy. What one has to do, therefore,
if one wants to make progress, is to seek in good faith, experimentally and not theoretically,
what each process can give, according to the indications of the moment and the terrain, as
the student's psychological evolution progresses, and then not to hesitate to recognize the
moment when it ceases to be useful and can even begin to become harmful. And then,
instead of obstinately depriving oneself of the benefits of one or other of these processes, is
it not quite advisable, on the contrary, to combine them with a view to maximum possible
efficiency? The processes of direct method[ology] cannot escape this law. Like all the others,
they have their relative value and their useful indications, and consequently also their limit
of effectiveness.
This direct methodology then became official, and those who imposed it were not the
"theorists" -linguists, psycholinguists and other specialists in the sciences of education- but the
language inspectors of the French National Education. They are the ones among this body of civil
servants who have most preserved a tradition of authoritarianism, and it is among them that
opposition to "theoretical" academic research on DLC is still strongest in France, on the pretext that
only they would know the realities of the field. Let us add to this the case of teachers who, as we
know, apply limited and fossilized practices on a day-to-day basis: in the teaching of language-
cultures, as in all school disciplines, the "centers", the places of power, are multiple and in
competition with each other. I wrote at the beginning of this chapter 2.2. that B.K. "only aims [...]
at the instrumentalization by the USA in certain countries of a particular methodology, the
communicative approach": as a result, the relevance and interest of some of his positions and
proposals do not go beyond this historical and geographical framework.
b) Describing methodologies as "caught up in the whirlwind of fashion" is a nice phrase, but it is
inaccurate, especially with regard to the communicative approach in the USA, which is still relevant
in the 2010s (under this name or that of “Task-Based Learning”) whereas it was already dominant
in the 1980s, according to the bibliographical data provided by B.K. himself. It would not be wise
from a strategic point of view, if the methodologies were really so well instrumentalized by an all-
powerful "Center", to allow them to be constantly modified by simple fashion effects.
The fact that the communicative approach is inadequately used in other countries is not only due
to its instrumentalization, or more precisely, this instrumentalization is made possible by the fact
that this methodology is, like all methodologies, difficult to modify and impossible to question as
long as the social objective of reference on which it was built - in this case, communicative
competence in a foreign language - is not called into question. The social objectives of reference
Christian Puren : " Didactic analysis of the postmethod condition of B. Kumaravadivelu :
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change very little over time: in the entire history of methodologies in France, I know of only five
since the 17th century, the last two having emerged simultaneously with the European Framework
of Reference just twenty years ago –plurilingual-pluricultural competence, and social actor
competence–, and they have not yet really been imposed in training programs and textbooks (cf.
Puren 029 with his bibliographic references). B.K. himself does not question the social objective of
communicative language competence in English: what he proposes, as we shall see later (chapters
2.5 and 2.6), are adaptations of the communicative approach in terms of communicative,
pedagogical and social cultures.
c) The "swings" cited by B.K. in this excerpt may appear negative if one limits oneself, as he does,
to the contemporary history of the communicative approach to English as an international language
as it is disseminated in certain countries. When he illustrates the pendulum effects, which are
always noticeable between two successive methodologies, he is content to oppose communicative
examples to pre-communicative examples. But if we look at the long historical period, we no longer
perceive these movements as simple pendulum effects, but as regular returns to constant DLC
problems, which are revisited each time in a different way, as when, after years of travel, we return
to the same places that we look at in a different way (cf. Puren 1990c). This is the very first lesson
I drew from my historical research in the general conclusion of my Histoire des méthodologies:
I was particularly struck by the richness of this past: the coherence of the methodological
constructions, the relevance of the debates, the intelligence and conviction of those who
took part in them, the permanence, beyond fashions and even "revolutions", of the
fundamental problems to which our era, like the previous ones, is striving to bring the
solutions that suit it best. If the existence of an autonomous discipline can be judged by the
specificity and the coherence of its problematic, then I believe I can affirm that in school
teaching, at least, a true didactics of modern foreign languages was constituted at the end
of the XIXème century. (Puren 1988a, p. 261)
I fully agree with B.K.'s idea, in the words he borrows from another author, that teachers have
developed
the conviction that no single perspective on language, no single explanation for learning,
and no unitary view of the contributions of language learners will account for what they must
grapple with on a daily basis" (Larsen-Freeman 1991, p. 269) (quoted by B.K. 1994, p. 30)
I strongly disagree, however, with the conclusion he draws: "In such circumstances, it is not
surprising that all attempts to devise alternative methods have proved to be an exercise in futility"
B.K. 1994, p. 30). Knowledge of these successive methodological constructions is indeed not only
useful, but indispensable to the professional training of language teachers. It provides them with
numerous concrete cases of the development of different teaching "strategies" because they are
adapted to different objectives, audiences, "theories"
23
and environments.
Now it is precisely this situated methodological competence that B.K. wants to train teachers to
enable them to extricate themselves from the grip of such and such a constituted methodology and
to develop their own methodology. But this competence cannot be given, as he proposes, by the
mere application of macrostrategies (cf. infra chap. 2.5.1) or of great pedagogical principles
(cf. infra chap. 4.5.2).
23
Here again I use the term used by B.K. We will see later that it is in fact the "models" which, in the discipline
“DLC”, ensure the indispensable function of the interface between practices and theories.
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2.3. The critique of methodological eclecticism
Introduction to Chapter 2.3
B.K. thus recalls in his 2012 interview with MarcoELE magazine the reasons why teachers generally
choose methodological eclecticism.
Actually, it is the presence, not the absence, of the concept of method that compels teachers
to try to put together what is called an eclectic method. They have been doing this long
before the concept of method came to be questioned. That is because they have all along
known the limitations of an established method, namely, it is not location-specific, it is not
derived from their classroom; it is artificially transplanted into it; it can not be implemented
as is, and so on. Confronted with the complexities of their everyday teaching, and frustrated
with established methods, teachers see no option but to try to invent an “eclectic method”
that might work for them. (B.K. 2012b, pp. 2-3)
I fully agree with this idea that eclecticism is an empirical response to the complexity that teachers
constantly face in their practices (Puren 1994e, chap. 2.1.2. "Eclecticism and Complexity",
pp. 59 ff.; Puren 1988b), and I see, as he does, the risks that this response presents if it is not
thought through. But my strategy in the same 1990s was different. It consisted not in abandoning
the idea of methodology, but in thinking of all methodologies within a discipline that takes care of
this complexity, a "complex Didactics of languages and cultures".
Below I will repeat the various arguments put forward by B.K. to criticize eclecticism.
2.3.1. Eclecticism would be limited by the concept of “methodology”
It is true that any methodology is limiting in the practices it promotes, but this is essentially
because, in order to be constructed as a global coherence, it must evacuate those components of
complexity that are heterogeneity, variability, instability and contradiction (cf. Puren 046). Now
B.K. demands the same level of coherence from the set of personal strategies that each teacher
24
could, according to him, induce directly from his classroom practices: such a set of strategies would
constitute - and he repeats the idea several times in his 1994 article - "a systematic, coherent
and relevant alternative to the methodology" (I emphasize). But in reality, it would run up against
the same limitations, and the same risk of fossilization: we have all known teachers who had made
"their own method"... and applied it identically in all their classes throughout the year and
throughout their career.
Compared to what would ultimately be only other personal or collective methodologies,
conventional methodological eclecticism, which starts from the great constituted different
methodologies, has this advantage of providing not only different, but for some opposing modes of
teaching, which are permanently at the disposal of teachers to manage the complexity of their
practices. To be sure, as B.K. writes in a quote from Freeman, "the conventional concept of method
‘overlooks the fund of experience and tacit knowledge about teaching which the teachers already
have by virtue of their lives as students’ (Freeman, 1991, pp. 34-35)” (quoted by B.K. 1994, p. 30),
but this is true only in the case of a single exclusive methodology. There is nothing to prevent
teachers, in an approach of reasoned eclecticism, from adding to their own modes of teaching the
modes of teaching borrowed from different methodologies. These correspond to a fund of
experience and explicit knowledge that the discipline has accumulated over more than a century,
and which is far more important than the experiences of a single teacher or even a group of
teachers. If, as B.K. writes in his 1994 article (pp. 31-32),
24
Or team of teachers: according to Widodo & Zakaria (2008) in their review of B.K.'s 2006 book, " the author
proposes building solid and conducive ELT professional communities and tapping local resources to overcome
local problems using local expertise and experience". This idea does not appear in my corpus of B.K.'s articles,
so I can only renew my reservations here about its representativeness.
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any pedagogic framework must emerge from classroom experience and experimentation
and is also motivated by the fact that a solid body of classroom research findings are
available for consideration and application,
I see no reason why the various components of the methodologies that have been developed, what
I called "methodological objects" in section 1.5 above, should not be examined as historical research
findings and applied by teachers whose objectives, audiences and teaching/learning environments
they suit.
It is certain that, to a certain extent, the specificity of the audiences, objectives and environments
requires fine-tuned implementations that can only be the responsibility of the teacher in his or her
classes, in front of his or her students, but this specificity is relative. There are in fact problems in
DLC that have been well-identified for a long time (since the direct methodology of the 1890s-
1900s, for the first ones) and that have produced stable and reliable modes of treatment - what I
called, at the beginning of chapter 1.5. above, "methodological objects" -, and it would be foolish
on the part of the teachers not to reuse them, as well as on the part of the trainers not to train the
teachers in their reuse
25
.
Moreover, the implementation of eclecticism is not limited to simple, more or less empirical
juxtapositions of different methodologies or methodological objects: alongside this "multi-
methodological" approach, "pluri-methodological" approaches can be conceived, in which
methodological objects are either articulated, integrated or combined with each other, as can be
the case with languages in a plurilingual approach, or cultures in a pluricultural approach (see Puren
2020f).
2.3.2. Eclecticism would require too much teacher training
B.K. writes about this in his 1994 article:
In spite of such good intentions, eclecticism at the classroom level invariably degenerates
into an unsystematic, unprincipled, and uncritical pedagogy because teachers with very little
professional preparation to be eclectic in a principled way have little option but to randomly
put together a package of techniques from various methods and label it eclectic. (B.K. 1994,
p. 11)
It is surprising to criticize the eclectic position, so widespread among teachers, on the grounds that
it is not suitable for very poorly trained teachers; because one should logically infer that B.K. thinks
it is suitable for all well-trained teachers; and because in fact very poorly trained teachers do not
generally venture into risky methodological combinations, but prefer to follow strictly the single
methodology proposed by their textbook or their initial training. And this may be a lesser evil, or
even a temporary good, until they have the level of experience and competence from which they
can launch into personal experimental combinations.
This criticism of B.K. can be immediately turned against his proposals, which also require, by his
own admission, a high level of competence:
The postmethod condition, however, recognizes the teachers' potential to know not only
how to teach but also know how to act autonomously within the academic and administrative
constraints imposed by institutions, curricula, and textbooks. It also promotes the ability of
teachers to know how to develop a reflective approach to their own teaching, how to analyze
and evaluate their own teaching practice, how to initiate change in their classroom, and how
to monitor the effects of such changes (Richards, 1991; Wallace, 1991). In short, promoting
teacher autonomy means enabling and empowering teachers to theorize from their practice
and practice what they have theorized. (B.K. 1994, p. 30)
25
We find these objects from one methodology to another, borrowing being a constant mode of elaboration
of the great historical methodologies (cf. Puren 1988c).
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I do not see why teachers as experienced and reflective as those described by B.K. above would
not be able to judiciously integrate into their practices methodological objects borrowed from
different methodologies, or to decide at certain times to build certain class sequences according to
one methodology or another, or to propose to their students several of the seven types of didactic
treatments of authentic documents belonging to different methodologies (on this last point,
cf. Puren 066). In the same article, B.K. contrasts eclecticism, which he condemns, with
"enlightened pragmatism", which he advocates; the difference, in his view, being that in eclecticism
the teacher chooses his practices from among the existing methodologies, whereas in "enlightened
pragmatism" he induces them from his own practices. But it is also a position that is just as
pragmatic and just as enlightened as the one proposed by M. Antier, D. Girard and G. Hardin in
their 1972 work (cited above in chapter 1.3), or, earlier on, that of the teachers who, at the
beginning of the XXe century, elaborated the half-direct, “half-traditional" "active methodology"
(i.e. grammar-translation) by applying the principle that Auguste Pinloche, already cited above,
presented as follows in 1913:
As for the choice of means, as far from the extreme tendencies of the past as from those of
our days, [the new pedagogy] knows how to combine all that can be good in the most
opposed systems and endeavors to use, after having experimented with them impartially
and measured carefully, all the procedures that can contribute to the attainment of the goal,
taking into account each time not only the practical but also the intellectual needs of the
pupils, and also the nature of the terrain. (Pinloche 1927, p. 5)
B.K. writes in his 1994 article:
As Stern (1992) rightly points out, the "weakness of the eclectic position is that it offers no
criteria according to which we can determine which is the best theory, nor does it provide
any principles by which to include or exclude features which form part of existing theories
or practices". (p. 11) (quoted pp. 30-31)
I find it difficult to understand why the "enlightened pragmatism" he advocates could succeed in
providing these criteria and principles, and not the "enlightened eclecticism" advocated by
M. Antier, D. Girard and G. Hardin. In the end, I find it difficult to distinguish even this pragmatism
from this eclecticism, except for the fact that for B.K. the designers are the teachers themselves,
whereas for these three authors it is a collaboration between experienced teachers, researchers in
language teaching-learning and school officials. On the other hand, this second strategy is not
without danger: one risks ending up in this way –and this was indeed the case in French school
teaching with the official methodology active from the 1920s to the 1960s– with an eclectic
methodology which becomes dogmatized and fossilized simply because it becomes official.
We shall see that B.K. We shall see that B.K., successively, proposes two different guides for
teachers to develop their own methodologies: "macrostrategies" in his 1994 article, and "organizing
pedagogical principles" in his 2001 article, on the basis of which teachers will be able to produce
multiple adapted practical responses. In both cases, the strategy is basically the same, which seems
to me to be relevant because it combines the rigor of predefined macrostrategies or agreed
principles with the possible flexibility of their modes of implementation on the ground. But I do not
see why these modes of implementation should all be constructed by teachers, when the historical
analysis of successive methodologies provides a great many, tested and validated for a long time,
which are immediately available for use, or at least for trial. In what profession are practitioners
asked never to repeat any of the established techniques of their trade, but to invent all their own
techniques?
2.3.3. Eclecticism would not allow the necessary coherence of practices
In his 1994 article, B.K. writes that there are " inherent contradictions between method as
conceptualized by theorists and method as actualized by practice", and he gives as evidence the
fact that there are language-centered methodologies, learner-centered methodologies, and
learning-centered methodologies, but that " view, none of these methods be realized in their purest
form in the actual classroom primarily because they are not derived from classroom experience and
experimentation". But he judges, as we saw at the beginning of the previous chapter 2.3.2, that
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"eclecticism at the classroom level invariably degenerates into an unsystematic, unprincipled, and
uncritical pedagogy". In his 2012 interview with MarcoELE magazine, he considers that teachers
cannot be "responsibly eclectic" because to do so,
we need to know, with a reasonable degree of certainty, which features of method A, which
features of method B, etc. can be combined, how, for what reason, and with what result.
And, all this has to be done taking into account the particularity of a given learning / teaching
context. (p. 3)
This argument of B.K. calls for the following remarks:
a) Apart from the fact that he thus daringly criticizes all those teachers who believe they are doing
their work correctly within the framework of a "reasoned eclecticism", and all those who have
supported the idea of an "enlightened eclecticism", B.K. uses here an argument that seems to me
somewhat specious: it is precisely because contextual specificities must be taken into account that
methodological answers cannot be given in advance. And it is the function of didactic training and
professional experience to provide this "conditional knowledge" (the knowledge of when and why
to apply this or that knowledge) which is just as necessary as declarative knowledge and procedural
knowledge for the concrete application of any skill (Tardif 1996). This is not an easy task, but it
seems to me to be less difficult than giving teachers, as B.K. wishes, the ability to construct their
own methodology in the field, because they are already provided with a set of ready-made answers
that only need to be used wisely. For beginning teachers, about whom B.K. is rightly concerned,
the equivalent of the "strategic framework" or "postmethod pedagogy" he proposes can be provided
by a type of research focused precisely on developing types of responses tailored to previously
characterized types of contexts, namely "intervention research" (cf. Puren 2019c, 2020h).
b) It is surprising that teacher-centeredness does not appear in B.K.'s list, even though it is still
considered the first historical phase in the evolution of methodologies, corresponding to the so-
called "traditional" pedagogy. Was this because he considered it too traditional? But this teacher-
centredness is not a problem when it is considered as only one of the available centring points: all
teachers sometimes ask their students to listen attentively to them; it is only a problem, precisely,
if they do so systematically. None of the centrations proposed in the different methodologies can
be maintained in the classroom exclusively, and one must rather conclude that they are all
necessary, some at certain times, others at other times. This even seems to me to be an empirical
evidence: at one moment or another, for example, the teacher will explain a point of grammar, or
encourage a student, or propose the realization of a project. The logical conclusion that can be
drawn from this observation is not that all the corresponding focuses and methodologies are to be
rejected, but on the contrary that all of them can be useful (cf. Puren 1995a).
c) When one chooses the eclectic option, contradictions appear not only between the constituted
methodologies and the methodologies implemented by the teachers, but also between the different
constituted methodologies, which effectively raise the question of coherence. But we must begin
by questioning the notion of coherence itself. One of the weaknesses of B.K.'s proposals is that
they are based on a single conception of coherence, which was that of all the constituted
methodologies, even though he wants to reject them all. This is why he can only envisage replacing
these methodologies with personal methodologies of teachers conceived on the same model of
coherence, which obliges him "mechanically", one could say, to a set of proposals that is in fact
teacher-centered. This is one of the criticisms levelled at B.K. by the authors of a review of his
2006 book, Widodo & Zakaria (2008):
In the texts of B.K. that I consulted, I did not find any proposals for taking into account the diversity
of students (their cognitive profiles and their individual learning strategies, which can be opposed)
and the need, in order to deal with it, to use sequences of differentiated pedagogy and autonomous
learning in which the teachers and the students will necessarily implement methodological
components that will not be of the same coherence
d) There are different types of coherence, all of which must remain available to teachers because
complexity cannot be managed by one. I have proposed a model of the "epistemological types of
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coherence available in foreign language-culture didactics" (title of Puren 058), which presents the
characteristics of the different coherences that I have called "closed", "open", "multiple" and
"virtual". Contrary to the American audio-oral methodology and the French audiovisual
methodology, which were closed coherences, the communicative approach was intended to be an
open coherence
26
; the management of different centrations requires the use of multiple coherences
(this is the type of coherence implemented in eclecticism); the materials on digital support
proposing individualized or collaborative learning paths in a network can only be elaborated in
reference to a virtual coherence.
e) In his argumentation, based on his observation of "inherent contradictions" between the
proposals of "theorists" and the achievements of "practitioners", B.K. proposes a "strategic
framework" that would allow teachers themselves to develop "theories of practice". In this way, he
remains with the same epistemological conception as that of the methodologies, even though he
considers them to be outdated. In his 2001 article, B.K. proposes three principles for his
postmethod pedagogy, including that of "practicality", with which he answers the same question
posed by Durkheim at the beginning of the 20th centurye (cf. above chapter 1.4). He writes thus:
"A pedagogy of practicality aims at a teacher-generated theories of practice".
The difference between models and theories is that the latter are mutually exclusive -one cannot
be both constructivist and behaviourist, for example- while the corresponding models, which are
also opposed, are at the same time complementary. A teacher will thus see no contradiction in
asking his students at one point to reflect on the rule they have unconsciously applied in order to
produce a certain incorrect grammatical structure, and then to have them do an intensive exercise
in reworking the correct model (cf. Puren 016). The micromethodological analysis of all the
methodologies constituted shows that they are made up of "methods" (in the sense of minimal
units of didactic coherence") which are all classified in opposite pairs - transmissive/ active, direct/
indirect, inductive/ deductive methods, etc. (cf. Puren 008) -, because complexity requires opposite
management modes. A teacher who asks his or her students, in succession, to conceptualize a rule
and then to apply it, thus moves from the inductive to the deductive method. And if the students
do not succeed in inducing the rule themselves (active method), the teacher may end up giving it
to them (transmissive method). So that the conceptualization by teachers of their own practices
cannot lead, contrary to what B.K. wants, to a "systematic" and "coherent" methodology, but to
these same modes of managing complexity, by opposing methods and centrations.
In his 2001 article, B.K. quotes Feyerabend: "[...] philosophers of science such as Feyerabend
(1975) would argue that there is no absolute objectivity even in scientific research". I understand
that the title of his 1975 book appealed to him (Against method)..., and I also quoted Feyerabend
in the same year, in my Essay on Eclecticism, but I did so in support of eclecticism (cf. p. 109 and
note 157 p. 92), because this is the position he defends, and which he even extends to opposing
scientific theories. In another work of 1989 (Farewell to Reason, 1987), he affirms, for example,
that "the only principle that does not hinder progress is 'everything is good'"
27
, and he defends
there what he calls, using an expression that could perfectly well be retained as equivalent to that
of "methodological eclecticism", a "pluralist methodology":
A scientist who wishes to extend the empirical content of his conceptions as far as possible,
and who wants to understand them as clearly as possible, must therefore introduce other
conceptions: that is, he must adopt a pluralistic methodology. He must compare ideas with
other ideas rather than with "experience", and he must try to improve rather than reject
conceptions that have failed in the struggle. (back-translation from the 1979 French edition,
p. 27)
26
What it has not always been in practice: closed coherence is generally more reassuring for teachers, because
it is simpler to implement; more practical for trainers, because it provides them with the guiding thread of
their program; more rewarding for inspectors... and for the didacticians themselves, because it legitimizes
their authority.
27
Page 7 of the 1979 French edition published by Éditions du Seuil.
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In the same book, P. Feyerabend affirms that "There is no one rule that remains valid in all
circumstances, and no one instance to which one can always appeal" (p. 196), an idea that is hardly
compatible with that of the "organizing principles" of B.K.'s postmethod pedagogy.
As we can see, this is the opposite of B.K.'s position, who certainly recognizes that there is no
absolute objectivity in science, but who believes that language teachers can rely on " an open-
ended, coherent framework based on current theoretical, empirical, and pedagogic insights" (1994,
p. 44), that of the ten macrostrategies he proposed in 1994. I smiled when I noted that in the
bibliography of his 2001 article, the subtitle of P. Feyerabend's Againts method, Outline of a
framework for language learning, is not given. Feyerabend's book, Outline of an anarchist theory
of knowledge: one can wonder if it is a coincidence, quoting an author who claims to be an anarchist
risking to be badly considered in an academic journal, published by an association created in the
USA, and, last but not least, destined to an international diffusion...
28
Conclusion of chapter 2.3.
Criticisms of eclecticism need to be handled with caution with respect to teachers. As I wrote in a
2004 article:
Strong needs for eclecticism [have been] traditionally felt in the profession but often
accompanied until now by a feeling of professional incapacity or even personal guilt: in a
regime of dominant constituted methodology (which was the case throughout the XXe
century, entirely occupied by constituted methodologies: direct, active, audiovisual and then
communicative), methodological diversification is not felt as an adaptive richness, but as an
inconsistent deviance. (Puren 2004d, p. 4)
Especially since these criticisms are not unanimous among researchers, far from it. Among the
authors that I have read citing B.K.'s work, I have not come across any who have taken up his
critique of eclecticism. There are some, no doubt, but what I have found are only three examples
where paradoxically his work is cited in support of the eclectic position:
(1) In her contribution to a 2017 collective academic work, Sonia El Euch, a Canadian didactician,
writes thus:
In reality, there is no ideal method or approach, and it is an illusion to try to develop one.
We are in what Kumaravadivelu (1994, 2001, 2006a) has called the postmethod era. Rather
than identifying or developing the ideal method, we need to identify the principles that
should be followed in developing a teaching methodology for optimal learning.
Kumaravadivelu (2003) has identified 13 principles that we believe are the foundations of
expert eclecticism. (p. 144, my translation of the French original)
(2) In a Manual de formación para profesores de ELE (Español Lengua Extranjera) published in
2019, one of the contributors, Manel Lacorte, writes that:
[...)) since the 1990s, there has been an increased interest in postmethodological
perspectives, which push for an "informed eclecticism" (un "eclecticismo informado")
regarding activities, techniques and resources for L2 teaching and learning (see, for
example, Kumaravadivelu 2006) (Lacorte 2019, p. 10)
(3) Even more surprisingly, the same interpretation is found in a review of B.K. 2006 published two
years later by two scholars in another American international journal on foreign language teaching:
Currently, ESL/EFL [English as a Second Language/English as a Foreign Language] teachers
are encouraged to explore what works and what does not work in particular ELT [English
Teaching Learning] contexts using what Brown (2007) calls an informed and eclectic
approach/method. He suggests that teachers explore all approaches to language teaching
28
The title of the other work by P. Feyerabend that I quoted in my 1994 Essay on Eclecticism was not very
"academically" correct either (Adieu la raison)...
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since no one approach or method is appropriate for all teaching contexts. Kumaravadivelu
has made a significant contribution in this regard in his book Understanding language
teaching: From method to postmethod by presenting personal and professional perspectives
on ELT [English Language Teaching] methods. (Widodo & Zakaria 2008, p. 1)
It is also on eclecticism that the Spanish interviewer of the magazine MarcoELE (B.K. 2012b) asks
his second question to B.K. after a first, general one about the difference between method and
postmethod. Based on these limited but concordant examples, it seems that, paradoxically, B.K.'s
work would not have had the international impact it did if it had not been interpreted as an
interesting contribution to the debate on eclecticism... which he wanted to close.
In a 1995 article entitled "Of Constituted Methodologies and Their Questioning" (Puren 1995b,
p. 6), I noted, like B.K., the failure of all constituted methodologies, and I concluded, like him,
that "the crisis of methodologies must serve to renew methodology" (p. 6). But unlike him,
I think that for this renewal, teachers and other actors in the teaching-learning of languages have
no reason not to exploit the constituted methodologies and their recyclable components (their
"objects"), in which is encapsulated more than a century of experience and collective professional
thinking.
2.4. The demand for teachers' pedagogical autonomy
"The condition of postmethod signifies teacher autonomy" (1994, p. 30); " Teacher autonomy is
so central that it can be seen as defining the heart of postmethod pedagogy" (2001, p. 548): the
two tools proposed by B.K. The two tools proposed by B.K. in these two articles are very
different, as we shall see, but what brings them together is the common goal, namely the
empowerment of teachers (and learners), as well as the common means, which is, in order to
eliminate the domination imposed by theorists on practitioners, the theorization by the latter of
their own practices. We have seen above that B.K., in his 1994 article, denounces the domination
of theorists over practitioners, and that he thinks that the postmethodological condition allows
practitioners to take their autonomy:
If the conventional concept of method entitles theorizers to construct knowledge-oriented
theories of pedagogy, the postmethod condition empowers practitioners to construct
classroom-oriented theories of practice. (B.K. 1994, pp. 28-29, quoted above p. 13)
There is, however, a notable shift in the conception of autonomy between the macrostrategic
framework of 1994 and the postmethod pedagogy of 2001.
2.4.1. Autonomy in the 1994 "macrostrategic framework
In the "macrostrategic framework” proposed by B.K. in 1994, to which I will return in chapter 2.5.1,
autonomy is limited by two factors that combine with each other: the fact that it is a framework,
and that this framework is exclusively that of the communicative approach.
(1) The macrostrategic framework is in fact a communicative framework.
Even if the notion of postmethod concerns all methodologies, B.K., in all his works that I have been
able to consult, is only interested in those that have communication as their main objective and as
their privileged means.
In his 1994 article, he presents the following typology of methodologies: those which are centered
(a) on the language, (b) on the learner and (c) on learning, giving as corresponding examples
(a') the audiolingualism, which is a pre-communicative methodological orientation; (b') the
communicative methods and (c') the natural approach, which is a variant of the communicative
approach. From 1994 onwards, I did not find in B.K.'s work any reference to Task-Based Learning
(TBL), a more common name among English-speaking didacticans
29
. But this is of little importance
29
Among the articles or contributions prior to 1994 listed in the Articles section of his personal website, there
are two that refer to the concept of task: Language learning tasks: teacher intention and learner
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here, since the TBL tasks are communicative tasks, and B.K. is obviously not interested in the
variants of the “communicative approach”
30
, nor in other methodologies. In his analyses of the
communicative approach, he never uses the comparative method, nor the historical method, which
is consistent with his idea of a postmethod condition.
B.K. does not question the communicative approach as such: on the contrary, he defends the
teaching of English as a language of international communication, but disconnected from the native
cultures, that of the countries of the Center –their teaching cultures, their communication cultures
and more broadly their social cultures– so that the local teachers can replace them with their own
cultures:
One of the avenues open (...) to create an environment in which multiple identities flourish
is to move away from the prevailing notion of English as a cultural carrier to English as a
communicational tool. (2006, p. 18)
His exclusive interest in the communicative approach is explained by his political struggle. In the
same 2006 article, he repeatedly quotes passages from a book by Hardt and Negri in which these
authors denounce the "empire"
31
, taking up their idea that "the control of linguistic meaning and
significance as well as the control of communication networks is becoming an increasingly central
problem for political struggle.
(2) The very notion of "framework" limits the proposals it can contain.
B.K. is not opposed to the communicative approach, but to eclecticism, which he criticizes, as we
have seen, for lacking principles and coherence. This is why he proposes in his 1994 article a
coherent communicative framework, which he conceives at the same time as serving the
empowerment of teachers. There is an opposition here, which is expressed in different forms in his
1994 article.
We find what is at least the expression of a tension in the following passage:
Clearly, the ultimate worth of such a framework is to be found in how well it strikes a balance
between giving teachers the guidance they need and want and the independence they
deserve and desire. (p. 44)
In the following two passages, what appears on reading is already more of a contradiction:
The research-based macrostrategic framework is thus offered not as a dogma for uncritical
acceptance but as an option for critical appraisal in light of new and expanding experience
and experimentation in L2 learning and teaching. (p. 32)
In practical terms, the postmethod condition motivates a search for an open-ended,
coherent framework based on current theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical insights that
will enable teachers to theorize from practice and practice what they theorize. (p. 44)
In this other passage, finally, we can speak of a double paradoxical injunction: "Be free, and liberate
yourselves thanks to the knowledge and assured principles that I propose to you":
Although the purpose of such a framework is to help teachers become autonomous
decision makers, it should, without denying the value of individual autonomy, provide
adequate conceptual underpinnings based on current theoretical, empirical, and
interpretation (1991) and The name of the task and the task of naming: methodological aspects of task-based
pedagogy (1993).
30
I will use here, for my part, this generic expression consecrated in French.
31
HARDT Michel. & NEGRI Antonio. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. This book has
been widely read in American academic circles, where it has sometimes been considered a new "communist
manifesto”.
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pedagogic insights so that their teaching act may come about in a principled fashion.
(p. 31)
Such a "coherent" framework, based on a single methodology, the communicative approach,
announced as supported by knowledge validated by research and very detailed (it contains ten
macrostrategies), but presented nevertheless as non-dogmatic and "open", is inevitably
reminiscent of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), which was developed at the
same time. It too is intended to be "flexible", "open", " in continuous evolution", principled but
"non-dogmatic" (COE 2001, chapter 1.6., pp. 7-8)
32
. It will be agreed that a flexible and open
"framework" is, in the real sense, a surrealist object as found in some of Salvador Dalí's paintings,
and, in the figurative sense, the equivalent of a UFO, in this case an epistemologically unidentified
object.
However, there are two fundamental differences between B.K. and the authors of the CEFR,
between their starting point and their aim:
- B.K. considers that teachers implement a unique methodology that is imposed on them and that
is inappropriate and even alienating, but that they can arrive at coherent practices on their own if
they theorize their own practices.
- The authors of the CEFR acknowledge that most teachers practice eclecticism (cf. chap. 6.2.2,
p. 140) and explain this by the fact that theories (linguistic, cognitive and pedagogical) have not
yet reached sufficient certainty for theorists to design the best possible methodology, which they
envisage for the future.
2.4.2. Autonomy in the "postmethod pedagogy" of 2001
Whereas in the 1994 article, teacher autonomy, as we have just seen, was conceived within a
detailed "macrostrategic framework", in which, as it is rightly said, it was... "framed", teacher
autonomy is much broader in the 2001 article, where it is guided only by three very general
"pedagogical" principles. This evolution is reflected in his later work.
The reason for this is a more assertive political commitment of B.K. to a type of pedagogy known
as "pedagogy of liberation": B.K. indicates at the beginning of his 2001 article that he is mainly
inspired by Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator to whom this expression is attached. It is from him
that B.K. first borrows his principles proposed in this article, a pedagogy of possibility (e.g. p. 542).
This "possibility" refers to what teachers, but also trainers and learners, can mobilize themselves
from their own knowledge and experience, and what they can do with it themselves; it is a question,
as B.K. writes in this article, of making them "coexplorers" (p. 537) of their identity, of their society
and of their project of social transformation. The pedagogy of P. Freire, which he claims, is indeed
a revolutionary pedagogy that aims at making all social actors reappropriate their own destiny.
Denouncing in his 2012(a) text the "self-marginalization" of local teachers in relation to native
teachers, he calls, quoting terms from P. Freire's Pedagogy of the oppressed (1e ed., English, 1972)
for "a concerted effort to 'chang[e] the consciousness of the oppressed and not the situation that
oppresses them'"
33
.
It is on the occasion of the definition of learner autonomy that B.K. quotes a well-known French
didactician in FFL, Henri Holec, for his introduction to a book edited by him and published in 1988
by the Council of Europe. He cites his proposals as characteristic of an "academic autonomy"
different from "social autonomy" (in the sense of collective autonomy of teams of teachers), both
of which seem to him insufficient compared to the "liberatory autonomy" that he defends in the
tradition of P. Freire:
32
On the contradictions, paradoxes and even inconsistencies in the CEFR, see my analyses in Maurer & Puren
2019, pp. 51-54, with their various bibliographic references.
33
B.K. never uses the concept of "alienation" in the works I consulted, although it is central to Paulo Freire's
work, and would have been very appropriate in the context of this quotation, since it is the alienation that is
the source of self-marginalization. It is possible that he considered it too Marxist-philosophical to use it again
in his publications.
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If academic autonomy enables learners to be effective learners, and social autonomy
encourages them to be collaborative partners, liberatory autonomy empowers them to be
critical thinkers. Thus, liberatory autonomy goes much further than the other two aspects
of learner autonomy by actively seeking to help learners recognize sociopolitical
impediments to realization of their full human potential and by providing them with the
intellectual tools necessary to overcome those impediments
34
. (B.K. 2001, p. 547)
In his interview with MarcoELE, addressing the magazine's teacher readers, his call for autonomy
takes on libertarian overtones that neither H. Holec nor probably the editors of this magazine would
be willing to take on board:
Liberty is not something that is given; liberty is something that is taken. My advice to
teachers: go, take your liberty.
I know it is easily said than done. I know teachers everywhere work under tremendous
governmental and institutional constraints. Seldom do they have the freedom to make their
own decisions on crucial matters such as curriculum design, textbook production / adoption,
classroom teaching, etc. And yet, it is within such constraining environment that they have
to find a way to make a difference. They can, and they should. (2012b, p. 6)
2.5. The two tools for empowering teachers: a "macrostrategic framework" (1994)
and a "postmethod pedagogy" (2001)
I have already, in the previous chapter 2.4, analyzed B.K's two programmatic articles, of 1994 and
2001, with regard to teacher autonomy, an autonomy which is, according to him, at the "center"
or "heart" of his project for the decolonization of English teaching. In this chapter 2.5, we will
analyze again these two articles, each one successively, but this time focusing on the very tools
that these two articles propose, namely, in the "strategic framework", the ten "macrostrategies" as
well as the few examples that he gives of corresponding "microstrategies", and, in the "postmethod
pedagogy", his three "organizing principles". Readers who wish to do so may now refer to
Appendices 1 and 2 of my text, which provide extracts from B.K.'s presentation of these two tools.
2.5.1. The "strategic framework" of the ten "macrostrategies" (1994), a "communicative
meta-methodology" perspective
For his proposals, which are intended to be "postmethodological" while avoiding recourse to
eclecticism, which, according to him, "invariably degenerates into an unsystematic, unprincipled
and uncritical pedagogy" (1994, p. 30), B.K. proposes in 1994 a first strategy which consists in
developing a "strategic framework" made up of ten "macrostrategies". This framework is "designed
to help beginning and experienced teachers develop a systematic, coherent, and personal theory
of practice." I will be forgiven the following lengthy quote, but it is so that my comments can be
understood without the need to refer to K.B's article
35
.
The proposed strategic framework for L2 teaching consists of strategies and microstrategies.
Macrostrategies are general plans derived from theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical
knowledge related to L2 learning/teaching. A macrostrategy is a broad guideline, on which
teachers can generate their own situation-specific, need-based microstrategies or classroom
techniques. In other words, macrostrategies are made operational in the classroom through
microstrategies. As I see them, macrostrategies are theory neutral as well neutral. Theory
neutral does not mean atheoretical; theory means that the framework is not constrained by
34
I agree with this analysis of B.K. regarding autonomy in the H. Holec work of the 1980s-1990s, highly
dependent on the individualistic ideology of learner-centeredness, but I consider that even academic autonomy
must be limited (cf. Puren 2014d). It was not until the 2000s, with the developments of the Social Action-
Oriented Approach (“perspective actionnelle”, in French), that "collective autonomy" training appeared in
DLC as a goal (cf. e.g. Puren 2014a, chap. 3.5 « Un nouvel enjeu éducatif: l'autonomie collective » ("A new
educational challenge: collective autonomy"), pp. 11-12).
35
I refer interested readers to learn more about this macrostrategic framework, with some examples of
corresponding microstrategies, in Appendix 1, pp. 36-38.
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the underlying sumptions of any one specific theory of language, learning, and teaching.
Likewise, method neutral does not mean methodless; means that the framework is not
conditioned by a single set of classroom principles or classroom procedures associated with
any one particular language teaching method.
The strategic framework comprises the following 10 macrostrategies: (a) maximize learning
opportunities, (b) facilitate negotiated interaction, (c) minimize perceptual mismatches, (d)
activate intuitive heuristics, (e) foster language awareness, (f) contextualize linguistic input
(g) integrate language skills, (h) promote learner autonomy, (i) raise cultural consciousness,
and (j) ensure social relevance. These strategies are couched in imperative terms only to
connote their operational character and not to convey any prescriptive quality. (p. 32).
This passage, which is very dense, deserves several comments, even if one limits oneself, as I will
do here, to those that fall within the framework of the theme chosen for my present article.
(1) Very paradoxically in relation to the nature and function of the metamethodological perspective
in DLC (cf. above chap. 1.2), B.K. proposes a deconstruction of the communicative approach alone
at one level, that of macrostrategies, which would then allow teachers, at the level of
"microstrategies", to reconstruct this same methodology themselves ... B.K., in other words, wants
to give himself a meta perspective... without taking a step back. These macrostrategies in fact
correspond to the major classical orientations of the communicative approach, whether they are
more or less specific to this approach –interaction (b), the focus on the learner (h), the
implementation of the constructivist hypothesis (d, e, i), the integration of different language
activities–, or taken from the general principles of the so-called "active methods" (a, c, f, j)
36
.
(2) The proposals of B.K., therefore, do not aim at anything other than an intelligent, i.e. adapted,
implementation of the communicative approach: I do not see in what way they would make it
possible to manage a "postmethodologies condition" (in the sense of his expression postmethod
condition, as we have seen above), whereas they are not "post-communicative".
(3) These macrostrategies are not "neutral", as B.K. claims: since, as he says himself, they are
"derived from theoretical, empirical and pedagogical knowledge for L2 learning/teaching", they are
all dated and situated. As for the "theoretical insights", it necessarily corresponds, contrary to what
he claims, to underlying assumptions of a specific theory of language, learning and teaching. He
sees them as "neutral" only because he remains within the communicative paradigm, which, like
all paradigms, creates false evidence. I have often quoted in my lectures these lines from Évelyne
Bérard in her book on the communicative approach, as operating paradigms as machines for
creating unquestionable certainties:
It is certain that learning or teaching a language can only be done in a communicative
framework, insofar as it is necessarily a question of communicating in a foreign language.
(1991, pp. 62-63)
(4) I have already argued, in chapter 1.4 above, that one of the weaknesses of B.K.'s proposals is
his failure to take into account models as necessary interfaces between theory and practice. B.K.
quotes H.G. Widdowson, one of the well-known theorists of the communicative approach
37
, in the
following passage:
36
The classification I propose is debatable because it depends on the perspective one adopts. From a general
pedagogical point of view, one can consider that all the macro-strategies that I classify as specific
characteristics of the communicative approach correspond to principles of the so-called "active pedagogy".
But from a language-culture didactics point of view, these characteristics distinguish the communicative
approach from previous methodologies, active, direct, and of course traditional.
37
Widdowson's best known work in France, Teaching language as communication (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1e ed. 1978) was published in French in 1981 under the title Une approche communicative de
l'enseignement des langues Paris, Hatier-CRÉDIF, 192 p. The 1990 work cited by B.K. is Aspects of language
teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Unlike eclecticism, which is constrained by the conventional concept of method, principled
pragmatism is based on the pragmatics of pedagogy (Widdowson, 1990), in which "the
relationship between theory and practice, ideas and their actualization, can only be realized
within the domain of application, that is, through the immediate activity of teaching" (p. 30).
(1994, p. 31)
I think, as I have already argued in chapter 1.4, that B.K.'s conceptual framework lacks, as does
Widdowson's, the theory-practice interfaces that are the models, which make it possible to think of
the "theory-practice relationship" in a complex way. In the rest of the chapter, I base myself on
Puren 2015a, 2019i-es and 2020a to present these relations:
–The "pragmatics of pedagogy", to use B.K.'s expression, is not realized by the immediate activity
of teaching: it is a process within a system in which inputs of different origins and status –empirical,
methodological, technological, social, and theoretical– confront each other with the situated
practices of teachers and their theoretical models to generate praxeological models (cf., in Puren
2015a, diagram p. 50). Among the methodological inputs that are permanently available are
constituted methodologies and "methodological objects" (cf. above chap. 1.5), so that there is
always possible eclecticism in teaching practices, and this is desirable because these inputs come,
like the others, to enrich the development of praxeological models.
–The models can be initially of empirical or theoretical origin. The analysis of the historical evolution
of cognitive models of teaching-learning (cf. Puren 016) thus shows that the development of certain
models began with a theoretical "entry" (structural exercise, through behaviourism;
conceptualization of errors by the students themselves, through constructivism), but that the
development of other models began with a pragmatic "entry" (immersion and communicative
interaction, for example: one learns language by being immersed in a linguistic bath, one learns to
interact in language by interacting between learners in class).
Encapsulated in these cognitive models, as in other disciplinary models, are types of theory-practice
relationships, validated by the teaching activity of thousands of teachers over decades, transmitted
through professional training, and reproduced in textbooks: the "activity of teaching" is not
"immediate," to use B.K.'s phrase; instead, it is strongly mediated by history, training, and tools
(cf. in Puren 2019b, the eight different types of "didactic mediation," pp. 43-80). B.K.'s
spontaneistic and individualistic understanding of the theory-practice relationship among teachers
is undoubtedly an effect of the "immediacy paradigm", that is also the great epistemological feature
of the communicative approach (cf. Puren 2020g).
(5) The advantage of models is that they allow for the greatest possible variety and therefore
adaptability of devices and practices.
–We have already discussed the issue of autonomy. It is not enough to "promote learner
autonomy", macrostrategy (h) in B.K's list above. Autonomy, in fact, can only be concretely
managed in the classroom in relation to heteronomy, both of which must be thought of, among
other things, as the two terminals of a continuum on which the teacher must position his or her
devices in the most appropriate way at each moment (cf. Puren 2014d). In project-based pedagogy,
for example, the greater autonomy left to learners at the moment of designing their project is then
"paid for" by a greater directivity on the part of the teacher, who is the most competent to know
what his or her students are going to need in terms of language and cultural resources, where they
will be able to find them, and how to work with them. In the article cited above, I proposed a model
consisting of, in addition to the continuum, six other possible types of relationship between
autonomy and heteronomy.
–Another example is the strategy (g) "integrating language skills": since the beginning of the 20th
century, this strategy has involved written/oral comprehension and written/oral production, to
which interaction with the communicative approach has been added, and more recently mediation.
One of the particularities of this communicative approach, in fact, has been to favour, because they
seemed more "natural" than repetitive targeted exercises, exercises leading to the simultaneous
and/or successive mobilisation of several of these language activities (for an example, see Puren
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075). Regarding this macrostrategy, B.K. makes one of those rhetorical reservations that are
actually intended to reinforce the claim:
Although more classroom-oriented research is required to determine the full impact of
integration/separation of skills, all available empirical, theoretical, and pedagogical
information points to the need to integrate language skills for effective language teaching.
(p. 39)
It is empirically evident, however, that targeted and repetitive exercises (such as structural
exercises) also have their usefulness, as do other non-repetitive exercises targeting a skill whose
strategies we want to work on, such as successive listenings in the class of the same oral document
with, between each one, collective assessments of partial comprehension and hypotheses to be
validated/invalidated during the next listening. The combination or articulation of these various
types of language activity makes it possible to conceive of a great many models of the didactic unit,
contrary to the single macrostrategy proposed by B.K.
This framework of macrostrategies proposed by B.K. is part of the metamethodological perspective,
or "didactic perspective", since these macrostrategies are supposed to allow teachers to vary their
teaching methods according to their audiences, objectives and teaching-learning environments. But
while this perspective was historically developed in France in the 1970s, based on different
methodologies, B.K. paradoxically implements it based on a single methodology, the
communicative approach, which severely limits the richness of the models that can be obtained by
articulating and/or combining different microstrategies.
2.5.2. Postmethod pedagogy (B.K. 2001), a didactological perspective
At the beginning of his 2001 article, B.K. situates himself in the context of an evolution of ideas
following the first reflections of various authors, including himself, during the 1990s:
Continuing and consolidating the recent explorations and taking my TESOL Quarterly article
on the postmethod condition (Kumaravadivelu, 1994) as a point of departure, in this article
I attempt to provide the fundamentals of a postmethod pedagogy. (p. 538)
His political observation and project are the same, as can be seen in his initial presentation of this
pedagogy, in which he announces his three "principles for organizing L2 teaching and teacher
training"
38
:
Visualizing a three-dimensional system consisting of the parameters of (a) particularity, (b)
practicality, and (c) possibility, I argue that a postmethod pedagogy must (a’) facilitate the
advancement of a context-sensitive language education based on a true understanding of
local linguistic, sociocultural, and political particularities; (b’) rupture the reified role
relationship between theorists and practitioners by enabling teachers to construct their own
theory of practice; and (c’) tap the sociopolitical consciousness that participants bring with
them in order to aid their quest for identity formation and social transformation. (p. 537)
And it is always a question of being situated in a "postmethodological" framework, as can be seen
in the description he gives of the first principle of this pedagogy:
A pedagogy of particularity, then, is antithetical to the notion that there can be one set of
pedagogic aims and objectives realizable through one set of pedagogic principles and
procedures. (p. 538)
B.K. gives there indeed, by means of this "notion" that he criticizes, a good definition of a
constituted methodology: “[a] set of pedagogic aims and objectives realizable through [a] set of
pedagogic principles and procedures".
38
The addition of the first set of letters (a), (b) and (c) is mine, so as to indicate that each of the elements is
then taken up and explained by its purpose and means.
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If the political statement and project of the strategic framework and the postmethod pedagogy are
the same, the two tools are of a different nature from a didactic point of view of languages-cultures.
The first, as we have seen, is from a didactic perspective, the second is from a didactological
perspective
39
.
We see this change:
(1) in the definition he gives of his term pedagogy, where the expression itself indicates an evolution
in his thinking (cf. "not only [...] but also"):
I use the term pedagogy in a broad sense to include not only issues pertaining to classroom
strategies, instructional materials, curricular objectives, and evaluation measures, but also
a wide range of historical, political, and sociocultural experiences that directly or indirectly
influence L2 education. (p. 538)
The recourse in the didactic reflection to all these "experiences", in fact, necessarily leads to the
implementation of ideological, ethical, and epistemological positions characteristic of the
didactological perspective.
(2) and in the fact that its stated project is now that of a "language education"
40
:
More than any other educational enterprise, language education provides its participants
with challenges and opportunities for a continual quest for subjectivity and self-identity [...].
(p. 543)
B.K. seems, in fact, to have radicalized his idea of "postmethodologies" by abandoning the sole
methodology, on which, as we have seen, his 1994 strategic framework was based. When he refers
in his 2001 article to the communicative approach, it is no longer a question of criticizing, as before,
the unsuitability of the contents and the modes of implementation, but the communicative objective
itself, which amounts to criticizing this methodology as such:
All pedagogy, like all politics, is local. To ignore local exigencies is to ignore lived
experiences. Pedagogies that ignore lived experiences will ultimately prove to be “so
disturbing for those affected by them –so threatening to their belief systems– that hostility
is aroused and learning becomes impossible” (Coleman, 1996, p. 11). A case in point is the
sense of disillusionment that accompanied the spread of communicative language teaching.
From South Africa, Chick (1996) wonders whether “our choice of communicative language
teaching as a goal was possibly a sort of naive ethnocentrism prompted by the thought that
what is good for Europe or the USA had to be good for KwaZulu” (p. 22). From Pakistan,
Shamim (1996) reports that her attempt to introduce communicative language teaching into
her classroom met with a great deal of resistance from her learners, making her “terribly
exhausted” and leading her to realize that, by introducing this methodology, she was
actually “creating psychological barriers to learning” (p. 109). (B.K. 2001, p. 539)
This abandonment is consistent with the shift from the goal of language teaching in his 1994 article
to the goal of language education in his 2001 article. This is another striking parallel between the
evolution of B.K.'s ideas and those of the experts of the Language Policy Unit of the Council of
Europe in the 2000s, who, as Bruno Maurer points out in his 2011 book, abandon questions of
language teaching methodology for a project of "language education"
41
. What we see in both cases
is the inability to maintain the recursivity between the three constitutive perspectives of a complex
39
On the three constitutive perspectives of DLC, methodological, didactic and didactological, cf. above chapter
1.2.
40
In the 2001 text, the term language education alternates with L2 education. The concrete examples given,
however, concern the teaching of L2 English.
41
See, for example, the page entitled "The Council of Europe and language education" on the Council of Europe
website, www.coe.int/en/web/common-european-framework-reference-languages/language-policy-in-the-
council-of-europe (last accessed 25/11/2023).
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didactics of language-cultures, concretely, at this point, to loop the system by starting again from
the didactological perspective towards the methodological and didactic perspectives. We can
therefore understand the criticism of the two authors of the review of B.K.'s 2006 book, in which
he develops his idea of postmethod pedagogy:
One weakness of the book is that Kumaravadivelu provides purely theoretical and
philosophical notions of postmethod language pedagogy. In this respect, readers,
particularly practicing language teachers, should make a great effort to put such ideas into
practice (Widodo & Zakaria 2008)
An important difference, however, between B.K.'s position and that of the experts of the Language
Policy Unit of the Council of Europe, is that the latter, with their concept of "language education",
also takes into account –and even favors– simultaneous or successive teaching of several foreign
languages. B.K., on the other hand, remained focused on the teaching of English as an international
language. The diversity of languages and cultures that he envisages is that of the different language
and cultures of the learners in the classroom in relation to the foreign language-culture being
taught. He writes and quotes in his 1994 article:
[...] most L2 classes are not monocultural cocoons but rather multicultural mosaics in which
cultural knowledge is likely to diverge based on learners' cultural linguistic background as
well as ethnic heritage, class, age, and gender (Tannen, 1992). [...] We can do so by taking
our learners on the path of "cultural versatility" if we "structure tasks and assignments so
as to [...] elicit a synthesis between the learner, the learner's home culture, and the target
cultural objective" (Robinson, 1991, p. 118) (B.K. 1994 p. 41)
In this quotation, I have left cultural versatility in English, which is the ability to approach an issue
from different perspectives given by different cultures, because the context makes it difficult to
decide, it seems to me, between different meanings such as "cultural flexibility", "intercultural
openness" or even "multicultural competence". What seems more certain to me is that the
expression does not correspond to the notion of "pluricultural competence", in which, as the authors
of the CEFR write (cf. above chapter 1.5.)
[…] the various cultures (national, regional, social) to which that person has gained access
do not simply co-exist side by side; they are compared, contrasted and actively interact to
produce an enriched, integrated pluricultural competence, of which plurilingual competence
is one component, again interacting with other components. (COE 2001, p. 6)
In other words, B.K. does not apply to different languages and cultures the concept of "system",
which he mobilizes in relation to the three organizing principles of his postmethod pedagogy
42
:
The boundaries of the particular, the practical, and the possible are inevitably blurred. They
interweave and interact with each other in a synergistic relationship in which the whole is
greater than the sum of its parts. (p. 545)
GENERAL CONCLUSION
For my critical analysis of B.K.'s work, I have chosen, as I announced in the general introduction,
to use my own tools, and more generally my personal conception of the didactics of language-
cultures.
This choice has certainly led me to place much more emphasis on my disagreements than on my
points of agreement, which are, moreover, very numerous and important: the promotion of
teachers' autonomy, the recognition of their knowledge and skills, the priority given to the
intersubjective agreement of the actors over external injunctions, the importance of teamwork, the
refusal of any applicationism, the criticism of the perverse effects of any single methodology, the
essentially contextual logic of any didactic reflection and proposal, the close relations between the
42
The following quotation is the closing paragraph of B.K.'s own summary of the three principles of his
postmethodological pedagogy (see the reproduction of this summary in Appendix 2, p. 42).
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field of language teaching and social needs, objectives and environments. I also share his opinion
on the fundamental function of teachers' conceptualization of their own practices, which I once
called "theorization"
43
, and which I now call "modeling", a notion that seems to me to be more
epistemologically accurate, and which above all makes it possible to get out of the trap of a direct
confrontation between "theory" and "practice".
In order not to repeat here unnecessarily all the reservations and criticisms that I have expressed
about B.K.'s ideas, I will limit myself to a few more general considerations, beginning with the
above paragraph. I will limit myself to a few more general considerations, beginning with the above
paragraph.
It is not only their personal practices of the moment that need to be conceptualized and modeled
by the teachers, but all the collective and historical practices that are encapsulated in the
constituted methodologies. This modeling reveals these methodologies with their own conceptual
logics and geographical and historical variants, as well as with their composite structure of micro
and meso level elements, some of which are constants, others trans-methodological borrowings.
B.K., on the other hand, refers to a "communicative approach", that of English as an international
language, which he considers as a single compact block, because he uses it as a repulsor.
I think that there is really no possible autonomy for teachers without the support of a strong and
autonomous discipline that has already built its own models, starting with its own epistemological
model. I have used mine here, made up of the three methodological, didactic and didactological
perspectives, which have appeared successively in the course of the evolution of the discipline, but
which must all now function in permanent recursion, as complex logic requires. I think I have
shown, by applying this model to his work, that B.K. moves from one dominant perspective to the
next, personally replaying the historical evolution of the didactics of language-cultures without
using it to complexify contemporary thinking.
The discipline DLC, whether we call it that or something else, is the great absentee of B.K.'s work.
However, it is only from this discipline that we can question what cannot be questioned, even
collectively, from practices alone, whether they are teaching, training or research practices, namely
paradigms. We have seen that B.K. remains, in the different macrostrategies that he proposes for
his 1994 strategic framework, in the communication paradigm. If he does not loop the three
perspectives through which he has passed in the course of the evolution of his disciplinary
reflection, it is undoubtedly because the last one, the didactological perspective, corresponds
perfectly to his final priority project, which is ideological and political; but it is also because he has
remained with another paradigm, the optimization-substitution paradigm. He thus simply
replaces the strategic framework of 1994 with the postmethod pedagogy of 2001, whereas if he
had applied the complex adaptation-addition paradigm
44
, he would have systematically linked
the ten macrostrategies of the former with the three organizing principles of the latter, for the
greater benefit of didactic reflection.
I have shown in my works the great "ideological porosity" of the didactics of language-cultures with
the ideas of each epoch, the one studied by the so-called "History of Ideas" (cf. Puren 2006f); in
my Essai sur l’éclectisme (1994), I noted in particular the conjunction between the crisis of
methodologies and the crisis of ideologies (cf. Puren 1994e, p. 5 & pp. 42-43), a crisis that many
contemporary philosophers have pointed out (cf. above p. 11, with the reference to J.- F. Lyotard).
This crisis of ideologies has not prevented the emergence of new ideologies, such as those of
"authoritarian capitalism" and "illiberal democracy"; the crisis of methodologies, notable in the
1980s, has not prevented the subsequent emergence of new methodologies, such as in Europe that
of the "Social Action-Oriented Approach" in the years 2000-2010 (“perspective actionnelle” in
French: cf. Puren 2011c), and probably soon that of various forms of plurilingual approach, such
as the "integrated plurilingual methodology" proposed by Bruno Maurer in Maurer and Puren 2019
(part 5).
43
Cf. Puren 1999h chap. 2 "How to theorize one's practice? (the formation of questions)", pp. 20-35.
44
On these two paradigms, see e.g. Puren 2014a, p. 4.
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Even if his activism is highly respectable, I found it a pity that B.K. limited himself to the relatively
dated and situated field of his ideological commitment, because he would certainly have brought
other interesting ideas to a more general didactic reflection. Even if I consider some of his ideas
wrong, or not transferable to other times and places, many others seem to me very right, and
relevant beyond his field of analysis; and, above all, I consider that both of them bring a valuable
contribution to the necessary scientific debate in our discipline.
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APPENDIX 1: "A strategic framework for L2 teaching" (B. Kumaravadilevu 1994, pp.
33-42) - Extracts
N.B. I have announced in bold+italics the passages dedicated to microstrategies.
[...]
Macrostrategy 1: Maximize Learning Opportunities
It is customary to distinguish teaching acts from learning acts, to view teaching as an activity that
creates learning opportunities and learning as an activity that utilizes those opportunities. [...] If
we, as we must, treat classroom activity as a social event jointly con- structed by teachers and
learners (Breen, 1985), then teachers ought to be both creators of learning opportunities and
utilizers of learning opportunities created by learners. As creators of learning opportunities, it is
crucial that teachers strike a balance between their role as planners of teaching acts and their role
as mediators of learning acts. [...] (p. 33)
Macrostrategy 2: Facilitate Negotiated Interaction
[...] Negotiated interaction means that the learner should be actively involved in clarification,
confirmation, comprehension checks, requests, repairing, reacting, and turn taking. It also means
that the learner should be given the freedom and encouragement to initiate talk, not just react and
respond to it. [...]
Negotiated interaction can be facilitated through several microstrategies. Designing group activities
is one of them. [...] 1985). Asking referential questions which permit open-ended responses, rather
than display questions which have predetermined answers, is another microstrategy that can
generate meaningful exchanges among the participants (Brock, 1986). Yielding greater topic
control to the learner is yet another microstrategy that provides an effective basis for building
conversations. [...] (pp. 33-34)
Macrostrategy 3: Minimize Perceptual Mismatches
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[...] What impact classroom activities will have on the learning process depends as much on learner
interpretation as on teacher intention. It is, therefore, essential to sensitize ourselves to the
potential sources of mismatch between teacher intention and learner interpretation. [...] (p. 36)
Macrostrategy 4: Activate Intuitive Heuristics
[...] no one has sufficient explicit knowledge about the structure to provide adequate explanation
and instruction. [...] teachers can assist their learners' adequate grammar construction best by
designing classroom activities "in such a way as to give free play to those creative principles that
humans bring to the process of language learning ... [and] create a rich linguistic environment for
the intuitive heuristics that the normal human being automatically possesses" (Macintyre, 1970,
[Example of microstrategy]: [...] learner is to provide enough textual data so that the learner can
infer certain underlying grammatical rules. [...] (p. 36)
Macrostrategy 5: Promote language awareness
The emphasis on activating the intuitive heuristics of the learner is not meant to proscribe explicit
presentation of underlying structures wherever feasible and desirable. Such a presentation has the
potential to induce learning processes if it is done to foster language awareness in the learner. [...]
(p. 37)
Macrostrategy 6: Contextualize linguistic input
[...] It is thus essential to bring to the learner's attention the integrated nature of language. One
way of doing this is to contextualize linguistic input so that learners can see language "as a
comprehensive conglomerate, uniting all the levels of structure or rule complexes of a language,
viz., the structure of words and phrases, the structure of sentences, the structure of texts and the
structure of interaction" (Dirven, 1990, pp. 7-8). [...] (p. 38)
Microstrategies that help the teacher promote syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic language use
can be derived from, among other things, language learning scenarios (Di Pietro, 1987), problem-
solving tasks (Brown & Palmer, 1988), simulations and role-playing (Crookall & Oxford, 1990), and
discourse-based activities suggested by Cook (1989) and Hatch (1992). [...] (p. 38)
Macrostrategy 7: Integrate language activities
The nature of L2 learning involves not merely an integration of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic
components of language but also an integration of language skills traditionally identified and
sequenced as listening, speaking, reading, and writing. [...] (p. 38)
Macrostrategy 8: Promote Learner Autonomy
[...] It involves helping learners learn how to learn, equipping them with the means necessary to
self-direct their own learning, raising the consciousness of good language learners about the
learning strategies they seem to possess intuitively, and making the strategies explicit and
systematic so that they are available to improve the language learning abilities of other learners as
well.[...] (pp. 39-40)
[Microstrategies are designed to help learners] take responsibility for their learning and bring
about necessary attitudinal changes in them. This psychological preparation should be combined
with strategic training that helps learners under- stand what the learning strategies are, how to
use them for accomplish- ing various problem-posing and problem-solving tasks, how to monitor
their performance, and how to assess the outcome of their learning. [...] (p. 40)
Macrostrategy 9: Raise Cultural Consciousness
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eclecticism and complex language-culture didactics"
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[...] Raising cultural consciousness minimally requires that instead privileging the teacher as the
sole cultural informant, we treat learner as a cultural informant as well. By treating learners as
cultural informants, we can encourage them to engage in a process of participa- tion that puts a
premium on their power/knowledge. [...]
[Microstrategies] We can do so by identifying the cultural knowledge learners bring to the
classroom by using it to help them share their own individual perspectives the teacher as well as
other learners whose lives, and hence perspec- tives, differ from theirs (Swaffar, 1991; Walters,
1992). We can by taking our learners on the path of "cultural versatility" if we "structure tasks and
assignments so as to [...] elicit a synthesis between learner, the learner's home culture, and the
target cultural objective" (Robinson, 1991, p. 118). Such a multicultural approach can also dispel
stereotypes that create and sustain cross-cultural misunderstandings and miscommunication. [...]
(p. 41)
Macrostrategy 10: Ensure social relevance
Social relevance refers to the need for teachers to be sensitive to the societal, political, economic,
and educational environment in which L2 learning/teaching takes place. [...]
Learning purpose and language use are perhaps most crucial in determining the social relevance of
an L2 program. As Berns (1990) illustrates, different social contexts contribute to the emergence
of various communicative competences and functions in an L2 speech community, thereby
influencing L2 learning and use in significantly different ways. [...]
The immediate concern facing the classroom teacher is whether to pursue a realistic goal of
producing competent speakers with adequate communicative ability or an unrealistic goal of
producing imitation native speakers. [...] From a microstrategic point of view, such a goal
should inform the teacher's decision making in terms of appropriate instructional materials,
evaluation measures, and target competence. (p. 42)
APPENDIX 2: "Towards a postmethod pedagogy" (B. Kumaravadilevu 2001) - Extract
N.B. The division into paragraphs and the addition of bold are mine.
[...] one way of conceptualizing a postmethod pedagogy is to look at it three-dimensionally as a
pedagogy of particularity, practicality, and possibility.
As a pedagogy of particularity, postmethod pedagogy rejects the defense of a predetermined
set of generic principles and procedures aimed at achieving a predetermined set of generic goals
and objectives. Instead, it seeks to facilitate the advancement of a context-sensitive and place-
specific pedagogy that is based on a genuine understanding of local linguistic, socio-cultural, and
political particularities
As a pedagogy of practicality, postmethod pedagogy rejects the artificial dichotomy between
theorists who have been assigned the role of producers of knowledge and teachers who have
been assigned the role of consumers of knowledge. Instead, it seeks to rupture such a reified role
relationship by enabling and encouraging teachers to theorize from their practice and practice
what they theorize.
As a pedagogy of the possible, postmethod pedagogy rejects the narrow view of language
education that limits itself to the linguistic functional elements that obtain inside the classroom.
Instead, it seeks to branch out to tap the sociopolitical consciousness that participants bring with
them to the classroom so that it can also function as a catalyst for a continual quest for identity
formation and social transformation.
The boundaries of the particular, the practical, and the possible are inevitably blurred. They
interweave and interact with each other in a synergistic relationship in which the whole is greater
than the sum of its parts.
