Language Teaching: History

Human beings have always had a ‘natural’ capacity for acquiring spoken language(s) through communicative contact without formal instruction. The need for teaching arose, therefore, where nature was ineffective, i.e., in reading and writing (since c. 3000 b.c.e.), and, more generally, in the study of languages from written sources, particularly those belonging to an inaccessible (‘classical’) golden age, e.g., Latin in Western Europe. Initially, the teaching of modern foreign languages modeled itself on the classics, but in the past century various attempts have been made to foster spoken fluency by reproducing in class the communicative conditions of ‘natural’ social encounters.