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Interest in the history and culture of the ancient world revived and revitalized the study of Latin, Greek and Hebrew
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William Lily published a grammar book: Rudimenta Grammatices
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Henry VIII authorized Rudimenta Grammatices
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Richard Mulcaster spoke up for the use of English in his work First Part of the Elementarie.
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“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."
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"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”.
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“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”
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Robert Lowth’s Short Introduction to English Grammar is published.
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“The task of the educator is to discover the internal forces of Nature and construct a learning scheme consistent with them”.
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Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi developed the technique called “object lesson”; it uses a physical object as a discussion piece for the lesson
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Friedrich Froebel developed the “object lesson” technique further and created system of education for very young children: “Kindergarten”
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Gottlieb Heness, along with Lambert Sauveur, opened a school. Together they created the “natural method”.
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Maximilian Berlitz founded the Berlitz Language School in Rhode Island, employing an evolution of the “natural method” that he called the “direct method”.
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William Penfield supported the view that pre-adolescent children were well-suited to the acquisition of foreign languages due to the fact that their responses could cope with the demands of new speech habit. This lauched a series of initiatives in American elementary schools known as FLES (Foreign Languages is the Elementary School), all of which eventually failed.