ABSTRACT
The reform movement had its broad effect in Europe: in England, however, it coincided with the Morant expansion of secondary education, a need for new language teachers and demands on existing teachers that frequently could not be met. The university view of language as a discipline triumphed with ease over the radical view of language as communication. The university-controlled School Certificate examinations set up in 1917 for the many, the prestigious Open Scholarship papers of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges for the few reflected a view of language learning that was based on the study rather than the market place. The combination of expansion and examination orientation confirmed the existing methodological conservatism of modern language teaching. This may not be immediately clear from an examination of textbooks available: the interwar modern language textbook is a much more attractive work than its prewar equivalent.
