ABSTRACT
French had been introduced into the curriculum of schools without question as the natural choice of modern foreign language. In 1912 the Board of Education had issued its Circular No. 797 on Modern Languages, in which the position of German was described as especially precarious: it was ‘completely disappearing from the curriculum of schools in which it formerly found a place’. The report of the Leathes Committee constituted the first major inquiry of the century into modern language teaching. In a pamphlet of 1946, D.H. Stott, a teacher at Watford Grammar School, addressed the question of the dominance of French: French enjoys its overwhelming preponderance, not so much because it is more useful, or easier, or more attractive, or more educative than German, but for reasons of social and educational prestige. The expansionist 1960s were followed by a decade which has often been seen as a crisis period for modern language teaching.
