Editing Language education (section)

==History==

===Ancient to medieval period===
Ancient learners seem to have started by reading, memorizing and reciting little stories and dialogues that provided basic vocabulary and grammar in naturalistic contexts. These texts  seem to have emphasized coherent texts rather than isolated sentences such as those modern learners often practice on. They covered topics such as getting dressed in the morning (and how to manage the slaves who helped with that task), going to school (and evading punishment for not having been there yesterday), visiting a sick friend (and how to find an individual unit in a Roman apartment block), trading insults (and how to concede a fight graciously), or getting a new job (a piece of cake if you have studied with me, an ancient teacher assured his students mendaciously). The texts were presented bilingually in two narrow columns, the language you were learning on the left and the one you already knew on the right, with the columns matching line for line: Each line was effectively a glossary, while each column was a text.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Dickey |first1=Eleanor |title=Learning Foreign Languages in Antiquity: How Did They Do It? |url=https://antigonejournal.com/2022/07/learning-languages-antiquity/ |website=Antigone: An Open Forum for Classics |date=19 July 2022 |access-date=5 August 2023}}</ref>

Although the need to learn foreign languages is almost as old as human history itself, the origins of modern language education are in the study and teaching of Latin in the 17th century. In the Ancient Near East, [[Akkadian language|Akkadian]] was the language of diplomacy, as in the [[Amarna letters]].<ref>{{cite web |last1=Scoville |first1=Priscila |title=Amarna Letters |url=https://www.worldhistory.org/Amarna_Letters/ |website=[[World History Encyclopedia]] |access-date=3 November 2018}}</ref> For many centuries, [[Latin]] had been the dominant language of education, commerce, religion, and government in much of the Western world. By the end of the 16th century, it had largely been displaced by French, Italian, and English. [[John Amos Comenius]] was one of many people who tried to reverse this trend. He composed a complete course for learning Latin, covering the entire school curriculum, culminating in his ''Opera Didactica Omnia'', 1657.

In this work, Comenius also outlined his theory of [[language acquisition]]. He is one of the first theorists to write systematically about how languages are learned and about [[language pedagogy|pedagogical methodology for language acquisition]].<ref>{{Cite book |last=Jemu |first=Nenchuli |title=International Encyclopaedia of Education |publisher=Neelkamal}}</ref> He held that language acquisition must be allied with sensation and experience. Teaching must be oral. The schoolroom should have models of things, and failing that, pictures of them. As a result, he also published the world's first illustrated children's book, ''[[Orbis sensualium pictus]]''. The study of Latin diminished from the study of a living language to be used in the real world to a subject in the school curriculum. Such decline brought about a new justification for its study. It was then claimed that the study of Latin developed intellectual ability, and the study of Latin grammar became an end in and of itself.

"Grammar schools" from the 16th to 18th centuries focused on teaching the grammatical aspects of Classical Latin. Advanced students continued grammar study with the addition of rhetoric.<ref name="Richards">{{cite book|author1-link=Jack C. Richards |title=Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching |last=Richards|first=Jack C. |author2=Theodore S. Rodgers |year=2001|publisher=[[Cambridge University Press]] |location=Cambridge UK |isbn=0-521-00843-3 }}</ref>

===18th century===
The study of modern languages did not become part of the curriculum of European schools until the 18th century. Based on the purely academic study of Latin, students of modern languages did much of the same exercises, studying grammatical rules and translating abstract sentences. Oral work was minimal, and students were instead required to memorize grammatical rules and apply these to decode written texts in the target language. This tradition-inspired method became known as the [[grammar translation|grammar-translation method]].<ref name="Richards"/>

===19th and 20th centuries===
{{Globalize|article|USA|2name=the United States|date=November 2010}}
[[File:Sweet Henry.jpg|150px|thumb|left|[[Henry Sweet]] was a key figure in establishing the [[applied linguistics]] tradition in language teaching.]]
Innovation in foreign language teaching began in the 19th century and became very rapid in the 20th century. It led to a number of different and sometimes conflicting methods, each claiming to be a major improvement over the previous or contemporary methods. The earliest applied linguists included [[Jean Manesca]], [[Heinrich Gottfried Ollendorff]] (1803–1865), [[Henry Sweet]] (1845–1912), [[Otto Jespersen]] (1860–1943), and [[Harold E. Palmer|Harold Palmer]] (1877–1949). They worked on setting language teaching principles and approaches based on linguistic and psychological theories, but they left many practical details for others to develop.<ref name="Richards"/>

The history of foreign-language education in the 20th century and the methods of teaching (such as those related below) might appear to be a history of failure. Very few students in U.S. universities who major in a foreign language attain "minimum professional proficiency." Even the "reading knowledge" required for a PhD degree is comparable only to what second-year language students read, and only very few researchers who are native English speakers can read and assess information written in languages other than English.<ref name="Diller">{{cite book |title=The Language Teaching Controversy |url=https://archive.org/details/languageteaching0000dill |url-access=registration |last=Diller |first=Karl Conrad |year=1978 |publisher=Newbury House |location=Rowley, Massachusetts |isbn=0-912066-22-9 }}</ref>

However, anecdotal evidence for successful second or foreign language learning is easy to find, leading to a discrepancy between these cases and the failure of many language education programs. This tends to make the research of [[second-language acquisition]] emotionally charged. Older methods and approaches such as the [[grammar translation method]] and the [[Direct method (education)|direct method]] may be dismissed and even ridiculed, as newer methods and approaches are invented and promoted as solutions to the problem of the high failure rates of foreign language students.

Some books on language teaching describe various methods that have been used in the past and end with the author's new method. These methods may reflect the author's views, and such presentations may de-emphasize relations between old and new methods. For example, descriptive linguists{{Who|date=December 2009}} seem to claim that there were no scientifically-based language teaching methods before their work (which led to the [[audio-lingual method]] developed for the U.S. Army in World War II). However, there is significant evidence to the contrary.{{Citations needed|date=February 2025}}
Authors may also state that older methods were completely ineffective or have died out, though in reality, even the oldest methods are still in use (e.g., the [[Maximilian Berlitz|Berlitz]] version of the direct method). Proponents of new methods have been so sure that their ideas are so new and so correct that they could not conceive that the older ones have enough validity to cause controversy. This was in turn caused by emphasis on new scientific advances, which has tended to blind researchers to precedents in older work.<ref name="Diller"/>{{Rp|page=5}}

There have been two major branches in the field of language learning, the empirical and the theoretical. These have critically separate histories, with each gaining prominence at one time or another. The rivalry between the two camps is intense, with little communication or cooperation between them.<ref name="Diller" />

Examples of scholars on the empiricist side include [[Otto Jespersen|Jesperson]], [[Harold E. Palmer|Palmer]], and [[Leonard Bloomfield]], who promoted mimicry and memorization with pattern drills. These methods follow from the basic empiricist position that language acquisition results from habits formed by conditioning and repetition. In its most extreme form, language learning is seen as like any learning in any species, human language being essentially the same as communication behaviors seen in other species. Examples of scholars on the theoretical side include [[Francois Gouin]], [[Maximilian Berlitz|M.D. Berlitz]], and [[Emile B. De Sauzé]], whose rationalist theories of language acquisition dovetail with linguistic work done by [[Noam Chomsky]] and others. These theories led to a wider variety of teaching methods, ranging from the grammar-translation method and Gouin's "series method" to the direct methods of Berlitz and De Sauzé. Using these methods, students generate original and meaningful sentences to gain a functional knowledge of the rules of grammar. These methods follow from the rationalist position that man is born to think, that language use is a uniquely human characteristic, and that it reflects an innately specified [[universal grammar]]. An associated idea that relates to language education is the fact that human languages share many traits. Another is the fact that language learners can create sentences that they have not heard before, and that these 'new' sentences can still be immediately understood by anyone who understands the specific language being produced. 

===21st century===
Over time, language education has developed in schools and has become a part of the education curriculum around the world. In some countries, such as the United States, language education (also referred to as World Languages) has become a core subject along with main subjects such as English, Maths and Science.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.actfl.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/21stCenturySkillsMap/p21_worldlanguagesmap.pdf|title=American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages|website=www.actfl.org|access-date=18 May 2016}}</ref>

In some countries, such as Australia, it is so common nowadays for a foreign language to be taught in schools that the subject of language education is referred to as [[Languages Other Than English|LOTE]] or Language Other Than English. In most English-speaking education centers, French, Spanish, and German are the most popular languages to study and learn. English as a Second Language (ESL) is also available for students whose first language is not English and who are unable to speak it to the required standard.{{Citation needed|date=November 2024}}