ABSTRACT

Very few teachers or researchers now follow any particular method or approach in their language teaching. Practitioners of a method soon find a remarkable similarity between methods that are supposed to be quite different from each other, particularly in the selection and sequencing of the items that make up a course. This same similarity leads us to suspect that the various published courses are either drawing on the same findings of research and theory or are unquestioningly repeating what other courses have repeated from some previous poorly based piece of curriculum design. When we find, for example, that a “modern” course is using a syllabus that differs in only minor detail from one used by Berlitz in the 1890s and that does not agree with the findings of substantial research in this area on the frequency of grammar items (George, 1963a, 1963b), then our worst suspicions are justified.