Editing Language education (section)

===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.