Methodologies and Approaches in ELT: A Search for More Effective Ways of Teaching Second/ Foreign Languages

The recurring quest for the best way to teach foreign language leads the language teachers, the researchers and more importantly the applied linguists to introduce new approaches or methods to attain their goals. They often ask what is the most effective method or approach among the existing ones and then they try to launch a new one which is thought to be better than the preceding ones. The study aims to examine the existing methods implemented to teach foreign language and to reach to a proposition that there are some methods or approaches worth implementing in foreign language classrooms. Even when the “best” out of the methods or approaches tends to be inconvenient or impractical for our own teaching situations, I propose pragmatic eclecticism to be applied in teaching foreign language. This article also aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the methods or approaches by keeping some certain aims and objectives in mind. I will try to show that some methods or approaches meet these aims or objectives which can help learners achieve the targeted goal whereas the other methods or approaches fail to meet. In this regard, this article provides a critical assessment of the adopted methods and approaches in the field of English language teaching, and claims that we must use every useful element of the methods and approaches rather than obsession with one of them.