Methodology in Transition: The New Focus on Proficiency

language teaching profession was engaged in a series of "revolutions," most of which had their origins in an attempt to reach some kind of consensus about the best way -"the one true way"to teach a foreign language. Yet, despite a few short-lived rallies around a common flag, the history of language teaching has been marked more often by controversy than by consensus. Traditionally, language educators, like linguists, have grouped themselves into two fairly distinct batallions the "rationalists" and the "empiricists" engaging in a never-ending controversy "whose roots can be traced to the beginnings of modern thought."2 Throughout the decades following World War II, theorists and practitioners in both camps devoted reams of paper and hours of conference time to attempting to convince one another that they were right about the way languages ought to be taught. Then, in the 1970s, waves of practitioners, disillusioned by the failure of the various "revolutionary" methods to deliver what they had promised, left the ranks of the absolutists to adopt a militant eclecticism, which, for some, became the new "one true way." With this eclecticism came a new kind of diversity within the profession, at least on the issue of methodology. It is not surprising, then, that in the 1980s most language educators still feel the need to reach some sort of consensus about language teaching. But for the first time in our professional history, we may be realizing that the controversy has been raging on the wrong battlefield. Instead of searching for one definitive approach to language teaching a search that has consistently ended in frustration and a sense of failure we should be identifying some "organizing principle" by which our various methods, approaches, materials, and curricula might begin to make collective sense. We need to define some set of requirements for language teaching that goes beneath and beyond any one approach and that relates in some clear way to "those elements of soundness and truth that are