ABSTRACT
I began my decades-long career as a teacher of English as a second and foreign language in 1975. That was also the year that I took my first Arabic course. At the time, many similarities existed in the way I taught English and was taught Arabic and in the way I had been taught French and Spanish in grade school and college in the decades preceding that. The techniques in all these instances used mimicry and memorization, noncommunicative practice with dialogues, and readings and listenings chosen more for the linguistic forms present than for relevance to students, most devoid of authenticity. There were two reasons for so many similarities in technique between teaching these various languages. First, arranging encounters with native-speaking interactants or to find and reproduce authentic and current materials in the languages to be taught was especially difficult back then. Second, my teachers and I were teaching the way we had been taught, so although techniques tended to be refreshed and reinvented, no radical changes in approach to language teaching existed to make much difference between generations of teachers.
