-
476
Middle Ages
Practical uses of Latin skills in the Middle Ages. -
1500
Renaissance humanists
Renaissance humanists revitalised the study of classical languages. -
1550
Educational reformers
Educational reformers preached that education should grow out of the child's experience of the mother tongue. -
1582
First Part of the Elementarie
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. -
Standardisation
Standardisation of the English spelling system. -
First German school
Wolfgang Ratke opened the first German mother tongue school at Koethen in Saxony in the 1620s. -
Ratke's follower, Comenius
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". -
Joshua Poole's quote
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". -
'English' as a subject
'English' did not appear on any school curriculum until the late sevnteenth century. -
Some Thoughts Concerning Education
John Locke wrote an essay giving advice on a modern system of education to replace the horrors of the grammar schools. -
Education in Europe
Formal education in Europe consisted almost exclusively of the teaching of foreign langauges. -
Joseph Priestley's conclusion
Priestley said that "the propriety of introducing the English grammar into English schools cannot be disputed". -
Lowth and Rousseau's coincidence
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. -
Grammar schools
Grammar schools continued to reject 'English' as a subject until reform was forced upon them in the mid-nineteenth century. -
The 'object lesson'
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. -
Prep schools, Latin and French
Prep schools taught Latin and French because the public schools made it worth their while to do so. -
Direct method
The direct method was associated with the schools of Berlitz. -
Basic elementary education for all
Basic elementary education for all finally arrived in the late nineteenth century. -
'Early-start' and 'late-start'
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'. -
Linguistic minorities
Large-scale shifts of population since 1950 have resulted in substancial linguistic minorities in countries where they did not exist before. -
William Penfield's paper
Psychologist Penfield claimed in his paper that pre-adolescent children were particularly well-suited to the acquisition of foreign languages. -
Primary French
An experiment to teach French to primary school children was carried out by a native-speaking teacher in Leeds. -
The FLES programme
The FLES programme continued until the mid 60s with some success. -
Multi-million pound project
A project involving the production of audio-visual courses not only for primary and secondary French, but also secondary German, Spanish and Russian.
