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Practical uses of Latin skills in the Middle Ages.
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Renaissance humanists revitalised the study of classical languages.
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Educational reformers preached that education should grow out of the child's experience of the mother tongue.
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Teacher Richard Mulcaster's book sets out a programme for the codification of the English language as a necessary prerequisite for any serious system of vernacular schooling.
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Standardisation of the English spelling system.
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Wolfgang Ratke opened the first German mother tongue school at Koethen in Saxony in the 1620s.
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Comenius underlined the central role of the mother tongue in the child's exploration of meaning, claiming that "First of all the mother tongue must be learned".
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Joshua Poole prefered to have a child "well versed in his mother tongue [...] that when he comes to the construing of a Latin author, he shall [...] be able to tell distinctivly what part of speech every word is".
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'English' did not appear on any school curriculum until the late sevnteenth century.
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John Locke wrote an essay giving advice on a modern system of education to replace the horrors of the grammar schools.
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Formal education in Europe consisted almost exclusively of the teaching of foreign langauges.
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Priestley said that "the propriety of introducing the English grammar into English schools cannot be disputed".
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Lowth and Rousseau's books have an equally influential quasi-novel about teaching, learning and childhood that has been the bible of liberal educationalists since 1762.
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Grammar schools continued to reject 'English' as a subject until reform was forced upon them in the mid-nineteenth century.
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Small-scale experiment in which German was taught using objects of various kinds and a conversational method that totally avoided the use of the native language.
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Prep schools taught Latin and French because the public schools made it worth their while to do so.
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The direct method was associated with the schools of Berlitz.
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Basic elementary education for all finally arrived in the late nineteenth century.
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Traditionalists pushing early-start practices and reformers pushing late-start policies met on a government committee set up by the Board of Education to analyze 'modern studies'.
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Large-scale shifts of population since 1950 have resulted in substancial linguistic minorities in countries where they did not exist before.
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Psychologist Penfield claimed in his paper that pre-adolescent children were particularly well-suited to the acquisition of foreign languages.
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An experiment to teach French to primary school children was carried out by a native-speaking teacher in Leeds.
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The FLES programme continued until the mid 60s with some success.
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A project involving the production of audio-visual courses not only for primary and secondary French, but also secondary German, Spanish and Russian.
