A Brief History of Language Teaching
For centuries Latin was being studied as a foreign language all over
the world? The reason given for its study was that, it was the only language of
education, commerce, religion and government in the western world. However in the
sixteen century, French, Italian, and English gained in importance because of the
political changes in Europe, and so Latin gradually became displaced as a language of
spoken an written communication. Do you have any idea what the children who
entered "grammar school" in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries in England were
taught?
Well! They were initially and rigorously introduced to Latin grammar, which was
taught through rote learning of grammar rules, study of conjugation and translation of
written sentences and dialogues. An attempt to promote an alternative approach to
grammar translation method completely failed because everyone believed that Latin
developed intellectual abilities. Can you imagine what happened when modern
languages began to enter the curriculum of European schools in the eighteenth
century? The same basic procedures that were used for teaching Latin were applied.
You may ask, what were these procedures? Their textbooks consisted of statements of
abstract grammar rules, lists of vocabulary, and sentences for translation. In fact
speaking a foreign language was not the goal, which is why those grammar sentences
bore no relationship to the language of real communication. By the nineteenth
century, this approach based on the study of Latin had become the standard way of
studying foreign languages in schools. A typical textbook consisted of chapters or
lessons organised around grammar points. Each grammar point was listed, rules on its
use were explained, and it was illustrated by sample sentences. This approach to
foreign language teaching became known as the Grammar-Translation Method. In the
mid- and late nineteenth century opposition to the Grammar –Translation Method
developed in several European countries. Communication among Europeans
demanded for oral proficiency in foreign languages. Controversies emerged about the
best way to teach foreign languages and ideas were discussed and defended by
different linguists. The linguists shared many beliefs about the principles on which a
new approach to teaching foreign languages should be based. The natural language
learning principles brought about the ‘Direct Method’. Although the direct method
was popular not everyone embraced it enthusiastically. It offered innovations at the
level of teaching procedures but lacked a thorough methodological basis. Because of
the short comings of the methods discussed above the linguists and language
specialists sought to improve the quality of language teaching in the late nineteenth
century, and did this by referring to general principles and theories concerning how
languages are learned, how knowledge of language is represented and organised in
memory, or how language itself is structured