A long habit of grammar and translation

As globalization and the information age pick up speed, the account says, more people are learning foreign languages, and the method of teaching matters more. Until the early nineteenth century, language teaching in the United States and in Britain was alike in one respect: a grammar-translation habit that had lasted nearly a thousand years. In both countries, Greek and Latin were learned as liberal arts. A translation method focused on grammar was thought sufficient, and was believed to help cognitive ability.

After the Industrial Revolution, trade and international exchange grew, and the need to improve speaking for communication grew with them. Voices in the academy, the account says, then called for a turn toward communication-centered language teaching. Those steps are left as the account writes them.

A shock, a turn, and a definition of competence

At that point a historic event is said to have opened a large difference between the American and British courses. The recap names the shock, in the United States, of a satellite launched first by the Soviet Union, and a decision to strengthen foreign-language education as one way to raise the country’s technical strength. A method focused on communication, listening, and speaking is then said to have come to lead language teaching in the United States. The event is left as the recap names it. No later official program title, and no year beyond what the text gives, is invented.

Communicative competence is defined as knowing when to speak and when not to, and with whom, when, where, and how. Acquiring a language is defined as a process whose aim is to raise that competence. The competence itself is described as a combined result of grammatical use, psychological factors, social and cultural background, and knowledge and skill that actually exist. Teaching only the ability to recognize a grammatically perfect sentence is said not to be, in a true sense, communicative. A view of language as learned through trial and error, or sometimes created by a person, is begun and then cut; the rest is not invented. Citations to Lee Sang-gi (1976) and Jeong Haeng (1997) are left as citations. Their titles in the text are incomplete, and no findings are drawn from them.

Sources

1. an account of a long grammar-translation habit in American and British language teaching, a later turn toward speaking after trade grew, and, in the United States, after the shock of a Soviet satellite, with a definition of communicative competence.

Last updated: 14 November 2026