Questão de Língua Inglesa

In the sentence taken from the second paragraph of the text “It failed to develop a language learner who can communicate properly in English”, the pronoun in bold refers to “the previously adopted method”. Sometimes, though, the pronoun it does not have a referent, and is used to perform a grammatical function, as in “It is getting late”. In this case, it is sometimes called dummy it or empty it. The sentence in which the pronoun is used this way is: