language teaching came into its own as a profession in the twentieth century, was characterized by frequent change and innovation and by the development of sometimes competing language teaching idiologies.

the whole foundation of contemporary language teaching was developed during the early part of the twentieth century.

Throughout history such changes have reflected changes in the goals of language teaching, such as a move toward oral proficiency rather than reading comprehension as the goal of language study.

whereas today english is the worlds most widely studied foreign or second language, 500 years ago it was latin, for it was the dominant language of education, comerce, religion, and government in the western world.

Grammar is taught deductively-that is, by presentation and study of grammar rules, whicg are then practiced through translation exercise.

Vocabulary selection is based solely on the reading texts used and words are laught through bilingual word lists, dictionary study, and memorization

the goal of foreing language study is to learn a language in orden to read its literature or in order to benefit from the mental discipline and intellectual devolopment that result from foreign language study

The sentence is the basic unit of teaching and language practice.

Reading and writing are the major focus little or no systematic attention is paid to speaking or listening

The students native language is the medium of instruction.

In this chapter, we have discussed the beginning of methods that in the early years included an emphasis on Latin and grammatical translation. The reform movement then led to a greater emphasis on spoken language and the development of the direct method, a "natural method", and on emphasizing native speaker input as a way for the learner to induce linguistic patterns in the target language.

They often did so by referring to general principles and theories concerning how languages are learned, how knowledge of language is represented and organized in memory.

In other words, it referens to the "philosophy" or belief system that a method reflects. We will examine the linguistic and psycholinguistic aspects of approach in turn.

how language content is selected and organized within the method, that is, the syllabus model the method incorporates.

the roles of learners
the roles of teachers
the role of instructional materials

the types of learning tasks and teaching activities the method advocates

Some methods set out to teach general communication skill and give greater priority to the ability to express oneself meaningfull and to make oneself understood that to grammatical accuracy or perfect pronunciation.

In the remaining chapters of this book, we will attempt to make each of these features of approaches and methods in use today.