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Episode 25: There Is No Best Method–Why? Discussing Prabhu (1990)

Show Notes

We discussed this article: 

Prabhu, N. S. (1990). There is no best method—Why?. TESOL Quarterly, 24(2), 161-176. https://doi.org/10.2307/3586897

It is freely available online at the link above. Diane missed the number of times it has been cited – “only” 1666 citations as of Feb. 28, 2025. That is still quite a lot in the field of applied linguistics/language teaching and learning. 

Needs analysis: 

Ch. 3 of this book is about needs analysis in language course design: 

Macalister, J., & Nation, I. P. (2019). Language curriculum design. Routledge. 

Information about the 2019 (2nd) edition is here: 

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780429203763/language-curriculum-design-john-macalister-nation

The first edition of the book (2010 edition) is available freely online here: https://shorturl.at/mX40e 

Prabhu (1990) cites Brumfit, 1984, which appears to be his PhD thesis revised for book publication: 

Brumfit, C. (1984). Communicative methodology in language teaching: The roles of fluency and accuracy. 

Intro & outro music selected from "23 Light Years" by CavalloPazzo

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Conversations about Language Teaching
Diane Neubauer, PhD & Reed Riggs, PhD

"Conversations about Language Teaching" is a podcast of unscripted discussions of language teaching, drawing on both research and classroom & online language teaching. If you like thinking deeply about issues of classroom language teaching and how those relate to research and theory, this podcast might be for you.

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