CHAPTER 1
WHAT SEEMS TO BE WHAT IN LANGUAGE TEACHING
Language teaching has shared neither the honesty nor the self-knowledge of the fine arts. Whereas artists are willing to seek inspiration from the past, teachers, being cursed with the assumption that their discoveries are necessarily an improvement on what went on before, are reluctant to learn from history.
Of the making of many orthodoxies there is truly no end. Harold Dunkel has reminded us that even in the 16th and 17th centuries, language teachers faced much the same problems that we face, and sought similar solutions.
The student began study of the language at an early age with a large number of contact hours. He was required to speak the language at all times, he studied other subjects through it, and had opportunities for additional practice outside of class. He learned dialogues, and had visual aids…. How much the vernacular should be used in teaching was a matter of hot dispute, and to teach grammar inductively, yet systematically, comprehensively, and efficiently was as difficult then as now.
E. V. Gatenby in 1950 doubted whether any new principle had been discovered since Gouin. Gudschinsky (1968, p. x) acknowledges that most of the basic ideas in her book are found in Sweet (1900), Cummings (1916), Palmer (1917) and Ward (1937). Yet in the pages of our professional journals, applied linguists still cry back and forth to one another in Viëtor's words of nearly a century
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