Teaching languages to young learners: patterns in history.

By rodriguez.alexia
  • 1500

    Latin, Greek and Hebrew

    Interest in the history and culture of the ancient world revived and revitalized the study of Latin, Greek and Hebrew
  • 1534

    William Lily

    William Lily published a grammar book: Rudimenta Grammatices
  • 1542

    Henry VIII

    Henry VIII authorized Rudimenta Grammatices
  • 1582

    Richard Mulcaster

    Richard Mulcaster spoke up for the use of English in his work First Part of the Elementarie.

  • Wolfgang Ratke

    “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

    "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”.

  • John Locke

    “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”

  • Robert Lowth

    Robert Lowth’s Short Introduction to English Grammar is published.

  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau

    “The task of the educator is to discover the internal forces of Nature and construct a learning scheme consistent with them”.

  • Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi

    Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi developed the technique called “object lesson”; it uses a physical object as a discussion piece for the lesson

  • Friedrich Froebel

    Friedrich Froebel developed the “object lesson” technique further and created system of education for very young children: “Kindergarten”

  • Gottlieb Heness & Lambert Sauveur

    Gottlieb Heness, along with Lambert Sauveur, opened a school. Together they created the “natural method”.

  • Maximilian Berlitz

    Maximilian Berlitz founded the Berlitz Language School in Rhode Island, employing an evolution of the “natural method” that he called the “direct method”.

  • William Penfield

    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.