Approaches to language teaching come and go. When I first taught English, over twenty years ago in a Moroccan high school, I and most of my colleagues used a grammar-translation approach. Since then, in a variety of institutions in many different countries, I have used audiolingual techniques in a Direct Method school, a functional-situational approach, ´hard´ and ´soft´ versions of the communicative approach, a lexical approach, a task-based approach and a number of combinations of all of these. Over the years, it became increasingly clear that the grail of the ´perfect´ approach was elusive and unobtainable. Different things work with different students in different educational contexts. We live, as the US-based educationalist Kumaravadivelu has put it, in a ´post-method condition´. The best approach to any language teaching situation will be eclectic, drawing on a multitude of approaches and techniques, choosing and shaping them in ways that are appropriate to our own particular classrooms. The approach in Straightforward, therefore, is eclectic and seeks to incorporate elements from many different approaches to language teaching. Coursebooks, of course, reflect changing fashions and in recent years we have seen examples that follow a task-based approach, a lexical approach or approaches that are driven by an analysis of computer databases. With Straightforward, we did not want to be restricted in this way. As students develop their language competence and their autonomy as learners, their needs will change and our approach to teaching will need to change, too. Because of this, our approach to syllabus and task design changes through the levels of the course. All of the levels share the same basic design, but the approaches to the teaching of grammar and the assumptions about students? independence, for example, are not exactly the same from one level to the next.
