ABSTRACT
The situation of foreign language teaching in mainstream schools in Italy has changed dramatically over the last 30–40 years. Change began at the start of the 1970s when Italy became receptive to research in language teaching methodology carried out internationally. Prior to this, teachers of a foreign language were not even required to have a degree in the language they taught and followed essentially a grammar–translation method where knowledge of the language – in communicative procedural terms – was not in fact required or even essential.
