Methods, approaches and techniques must be thoroughly chosen considering the objectives of language learning and teaching. They depend on audiences we teach and also on learning style of a learner. Each audience has specific purposes for language acquisition thus methods can occupy the result-oriented or process-oriented position. The main questions here are "who" and then "how and what way" a teacher is going to teach to get an excellent outcome.

It's not sensible to stick to one particular method or approach as life itself is changing every day so do trends within accepted and alternative approaches and methods. Theoretically, we read about them in books and other pedagogical research literature, investigations of the well-experienced teachers and value their artful applications of methods and approaches in the classrooms. But practically, we forget to look at ourselves and analyze what language teaching WE do in the classroom. Do we take into consideration our students' abilities, styles and reconsider approaches or we keep to the journals' articles to implement other teachers' approaches?

Language pedagogy is an art and nobody can teach you, but only you will be able to master it with consistent work, risks, reflections, analyses of issues and outcome in your classroom. I always have to remind myself Brown's words (2002) "The complexity of the second language acquistion process warrants a multiple-treatment, multiphase approach to a language course". He further states "It is the teacher's task to carefully and deliberately choose among these many options to formulate a pedagogical sequence of techniques in the classroom. And this is where a teacher's choices must be 'principled'."

Having experimented with a lot of methods, I am still asking myself, "am I better positioned to select the best of each method and apply it based on the objectives and needs of the students?"

Reference:

Brown, H.D. (2002). English language teaching in the "post-methods" era: Toward better diagnosis, treatment and assessment. In J.C. Richards and W.A. Renanyda (Eds.), Methods in language teaching. (pp.9-18). New York, NY: Cambridge