History of English Teaching timeline

In the sixteenth century, French, Italian, and English gained in importance as a result of political changes in Europe, and Latin gradually became displaced as a language of spoken and written communication. The study of classical Latin (the Latin in which the classical works of Virgil, Ovid, and Cicero were written) and an analysis of its grammar and rhetoric became the model for foreign language study from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.

There were occasional attempts to promote alternative approaches to education; Roger Ascham and Montaigne in the sixteenth century Children entering “grammar school”, in England were initially giving a rigorous introduction to Latin grammar, which was taught through rote learning of grammar rules, study of declensions and conjugations, translation and practice in writing sample sentences, sometimes with the use of parallel bilingual texts and dialogue (Kell y 1969; Howatt 1983).

Comenius and Locke had made specific proposals for curriculum reform and for changes in the way Latin was taught,but since Latin and Greek had been regarded as the classical and most ideal form of language, it was not surprising that ideas about the role of language study in the curriculum reflected the long established status of Latin.Latin was said to develop intellectual abilities,and the study of Latin grammar became an end in itself.

Textbooks consisted of statements of abstract grammar rules, lists of vocabulary, and sentences for translation. Speaking the foreign language was not the goal, and oral practice was limited to students reading aloud the sentences they had translated. These sentences were constructed to illustrate the grammatical system of the language and consequently bore no relation to the language of real communication.

It is focused on grammatical rules as the basis for translating from the second to the native language.
Main characteristics: classes are taught in the mother tongue, the vocabulary is taught in the form of lists, little or no attention is given to pronunciation and most exercises are based on translating disconnected sentences.
Most instructors now aknowledge that this method is ineffective by itself. It is now more commonly used in the traditional instructions of the classical languages.

Francois Gouin found out that the key points for learning a Language are that it's more important to learn sentences to speak than words, that verbs are the key elements in sentences, and that sentences are more easily learned when they form a narrative. Therefore hat language learning is a matter of transforming perceptions into conceptions and then using language to represent these conceptions.

Inspired by Wilhelm Viëtor’s pseudonymous pamphlet
Der Sprachunterricht muss umkehren! Viëtor
argues for a lesson design that puts exposure to the foreign language first — in his case in the form of a connected text. This text provides the basis for all the detailed classwork on pronunciation and the intensive question-and-answer oral work which lie at the heart of the approach. Grammar is dealt with ‘inductively’, after the text study, and is very tightly restricted to the language in the text.

Berlitz pointed out that second language learning is similar to first language learning. In this light, there should be lots of oral interaction, spontaneous use of the language, no translation, and little if any analysis of grammatical rules and syntactic structures.
Berlitz wanted to immerse students in the target language. He believed that one could learn a second language by imitating the way children learn their first language; that is, directly and without explanations of grammar structure

The approach based on the study of Latin had become the standard way of studying foreign languages in schools.
Nineteenth century textbook compilers were mainly determined to codify the foreign language into frozen rules of morphology and syntax to be explained and eventually memorized. Oral work was reduced to an absolute minimum while a handful of written exercises, constructed at random came as a sort ' of appendix to the rules.

The Direct-Natural Method
•Lessons in the target language
•A focus on everyday vocabulary
•Visual aids to teach vocabulary
•The accuracy of pronunciation
•Comprehension and oral expression

The Reading Approach: Reading becomes important because it is an active skill which involves inferencing, guessing, predicting etc. It also has, more often than not, a communicative function. Students will know about kinds of tenses and how to use it. They also will know about the different cultures, and they will learn how to pronounce the words correctly. The teacher should teach and emphasized the students to read effectively.

The Oral Approach / Situational Language Teaching
Developed by British applied linguists such as Harold Palmer and A.S. Hornsby.
Palmer stated structural differences between the
mother tongue and the target language would account for the major learning difficulties. Language learners everywhere were viewed as essentially the same, with the same (scientifically analyzed) lexical and grammatical patterns following the same (scientifically graded) acquisition curricula.

The Audiolingual Method: Developed around World War II when governments realized that they needed more people who could conduct conversations fluently in a variety of languages, work as interpreters, code-room assistants, and translators. This first version of the method was originally called the oral method, the aural-oral method or the structural approach. Under this method, students listen to or view recordings of language models acting in situations.

Audiolingual "Army" Method: Known as the Army Method at first. Its name is due to it was used to try spies in the World War II. Basically, this method was based on oral production, pronunciation and vocabulary rather than grammatical explanation are an important factor when using this method.

Universal Grammar
Noam Chomsky said that no longer did babies begin life with a tabula rasa; in fact, it was just the opposite they are born with an innate system of grammar already fired up and ready to go. Behaviorism went right out the window. Humanistic thinkers such as Carl Rogers insisted that people are—well—people. Everyone is a unique individual who responds in her/his unique way to any given situation.

With Chomsky and his new theories, it was a total revolution in linguistics. That's to say, new methods were also implemented. David Nunan (1989) referred to this as the Designer Methods such as Suggestopedia, the Silent Way, strategies-based instruction and Communicative Language Teaching ( this last method is said to be an approach rather than a method).

A discovery learning approach, invented by Caleb Gattegno. It is often considered to be one of the humanistic approaches. It is called the Silent Way because the teacher is usually silent, leaving room for the students to talk and explore the language. The students are responsible for their own learning and are encouraged to interact with one another. The role of the teacher is to give clues to the students, not to model the language.

This method was derived from Bulgarian psychologist Georgi Lozanov´s ideas. He thought that the brain could process great quantities of material if given the right conditions for learning, such as relaxation and giving over of control to the teacher. Music was central to this method.

Tracy D. Terrell along with Stephen Krashen, wrote The Natural Approach. The natural approach is a comprehension-based language learning methodology which emphasizes the idea of exposure and the lowering of affective or emotional barriers to learning. Krashen and Terrell see communication as the primary function of language, and since their approach focues on teaching communicative abilities, they refer to the Natural Approach as an example of the Communicative Approach.

Communicative Approach: Sauvignon (1983, 1997, 2002) suggests designing the curriculum to include language arts,
language-for-a-purpose (content-based and immersion) activities, personalized language use, theatre arts (including simulations, role plays, and social interaction games), and language use “beyond the classroom”.

•Strategies-based instruction: Emphasised the importance of style awareness and strategy development in ensuring mastery of a foreign language. In this vein, many textbooks and entire syllabi offered guidelines on constructing strategy-building activities.
•Communicative Language Teaching: Focus on all of the components of communicative competence, not only grammatical or linguistic competence. Engaging learners in the pragmatic, functional use of language for meaningful purposes.

Total Physical Response: James Asher reasoned that since children in the process of acquiring their native language seem to listen more than they speak and often react physically to speech, L2 learners might learn a target language in the same way. It´s an effective methodology in small doses when language learners have no knowledge of the target language. It gets students out of their seats, which alleviates boredom and allows students to associate specific actions with specific language.

In Active learning approach, the language teacher enables the learners too, individually, involve on course related activity in the classroom than just listening to the instructor. This approach endorses the learners to think individually and respond differently by active involvement and it energizes the entire class and makes it curious to know how innovatively or differently the
learner responds on a given task. This system encouraged the spirit of competitiveness among the learners.

In this method, the language teacher involves the learners in group and they initiate deliberations on the given task, where the group participation and shared thought process will have a say at the end of the participation, resulting in an improvised result at the end.
In this approach, the assignments are done and handled by the teams. Here in this method, the involvement of the learners to enhance their approach to language learning and their adaptability are in focus.

CLIL ( Content and Language Integrated Learning): It involves teaching a curricular subject through the medium of a language other than that normally used. In its strong version, teachers working with CLIL are specialists in their own discipline rather than traditional language teachers. The 4C's framework for CLIL considers the following dimensions: Content, Culture, Cognition, and Communication.