Editing Language education (section)

===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>