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1500
Major Educational Shift
Formal education consisted mainly on teaching foreign languages (Latin, Greek and Hebrew), by 1500 a major educational shift could have occurred; but instead interest in the history and culture of the ancient world revived and revitalized the study of said languages. -
1534
Rudimenta Grammatices
William Lily, along with many other authors, published a grammar book titled Rudimenta Grammatices -
1542
Henry VIII
Henry VIII authorized Rudimenta Grammatices as the only Latin grammar textbook to be used in education and schools. -
1550
Interest in the Role of the Mother Tongue
Around 1550, interest in the role of the mother tongue in a system of education for young children arose greatly; as such many educational reformers preached the same message: education should grow out of the child’s experience of the mother tongue and foreign languages should be relegated to a secondary role. -
1582
First Part of the Elementarie
Richard Mulcaster, a teacher in Elizabethan London, spoke up for the use of English in his work First Part of the Elementarie. He reminded his audience that English was the language of liberty and freedom whereas Latin was the language of enslavement and bondage. -
Wolfgang Ratke
Around 1620, Wolfgang Ratke opened the first German mother tongue school at Koethen in Saxony but the venture eventually failed due to lack of planning. -
Methodus Institutionis nova . . . Ratichii et Ratichianorum
Wolfgang Ratke published the book Methodus Institutionis nova . . . Ratichii et Ratichianorum in which he explains his principle: “First let the mother tongue be studied, and teach everything through the mother tongue, so that the learner’s attention may not be diverted to the language". -
John Amos Comenius
Around 1630, John Amos Comenius underlined the central role of the mother tongue in the child’s exploration of meaning: “First of all the mother tongue must be learned since it is intimately connected with the gradual unfolding of the objective world to the senses”. Foreign languages should not take up too much time and should be taught until the child was 10 years old (late by the standards of the time). -
Some Thoughts Concerning Education
John Locke elaborated in Some Thoughts Concerning Education: “To speak or write better Latin than English, may make a man be talked of, but he would find it more to his purpose to express himself well in his own tongue” -
Short Introduction to English Grammar
Robert Lowth’s Short Introduction to English Grammar was published. -
Emile
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile is published, where he mentions: “The task of the educator is to discover the internal forces of Nature and construct a learning scheme consistent with them”. The acquisition of the mother tongue is a special event but languages learned later are little more than artificial displays of verbal expertise -
Object Lesson
Around 1800, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Rousseau’s disciple, developed the technique called “object lesson” which consists of using a physical object as a discussion piece for a lesson. -
Kindergarten
Friedrich Froebel, Pestalozzi’s disciple, developed the “object lesson” technique further by creating a system of education for very young children called “Kindergarten” -
Natural Method
Around 1865, Gottlieb Heness, follower of Pestalozzi, conducted a small-scale experiment in which he taught German as a foreign language to children using multiple objects and a “conversational method” that avoided the use of the native language; the experiment was a success and, along with a like-minded Frenchman called Lambert Sauveur, opened a school. Together they created the “natural method”. -
Direct Method
Maximilian Berlitz founded the Berlitz Language School in Rhode Island, employing the “direct method”, an evolution of the “natural method”. -
FLES
After years of debating when should foreign languages be taught, William Penfield supported the view that pre-adolescent children were particularly well-suited to the acquisition of foreign languages due to the fact that their responses were flexible enough to cope with the demands of new speech habits and that this flexibility was lost at puberty. This lauched a series of initiatives in American elementary schools known as FLES (Foreign Languages is the Elementary School). -
British French-teaching program
In Britain, a small but highly publicized experiment to teach French to primary school children led to the creation of a pilot scheme to teach French in a great number of primary schools in England and Wales -
FLES closes down
The FLES program was closed because the breakthrough suggested by new ideas failed to materialize. -
British French-teaching program closes down
The British program to teach French in primary schools came to an end: the amount of time and effort that had to be invested was out of proportion to the amount of learning that was actually achieved.