ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a less simplified history of methods in language teaching. It discusses examples that grammar and translation did not dominate all language teaching until the twentieth century, nor was it a new idea to pay attention to the spoken language — not surprisingly, people had been doing that for centuries. The tradition of model dialogues in European foreign language teaching reaches at least as far back as the so–called Hermaneumata of third–century Greece, of which versions survived in medieval manuscripts. While two familiar ingredients of language learning — vocabularies, and dialogues — were being widely used across Europe by the sixteenth century, in most cases written grammars of the vernacular languages did not yet exist. With grammars of foreign languages now readily available, teachers began to devote greater attention to teaching grammar — it was, after all, one way of marking out their expertise compared to any mere native speaker with whom to practise conversation.
