Language Teaching Through the Ages

Garon Wheeler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135125615
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Teoría y práctica de la educación

Konrad Koerner, a leading historian of linguistics, has long said that an academic field cannot be considered to have matured until it has history as one of its subfields. The history of linguistics is a growing area, having come into its own in the 1960s, especially after Noam Chomsky looked for historical roots for his work. In contrast, the history of language teaching has been neglected, reflecting the insecurity and youth of the field. Most works on the subject have been written by linguists for other linguists, and typically focus on a specific period or aspect of history. This volume concentrates on the basic issues, events, and threads of the history of the field - from Mesopotamia to the present - showing how a knowledge of this history can inform the practice of language teaching in the present.

Part I

In the Beginning

1

An Introduction

In the Beginning

“In the beginning . . . “It would be very satisfying if we could start an account of foreign-language teaching with these words. But that, of course, is impossible. Who knows how long people have been learning a second language? As long as humans have possessed the faculty of speech (which is at least forty thousand years), groups speaking different languages have come into contact with one another. Surely some distant ancestors made a determined effort to learn the speech of their neighbors instead of just assimilating it by trial and error through frequent contacts. Did they ever hire some sort of teacher? Did teacher and student meet regularly? Was there any kind of plan, or was it just pointing and repeating? Silly questions, maybe, but it’s always interesting to ponder who the first person to do something was, even if it’s merely a pointless diversion, as it is in this instance. A similar case arose in the seventeen hundreds, when philosophers, linguists, and other deep thinkers confronted the age-old question of how language began. Eventually, it became clear that the answer was nowhere in sight in spite of the theories and speculations of some of the leading scholars of the day.¹ In fact, linguistic societies in Paris and London banned further discussion of the matter in the mid-eighteen hundreds— enough was enough. The same applies to our question. We’ll never know how language teaching started, whether it’s of a first or a second language. All we can do is go as far back as history allows us and follow the thread from that point.

At least two historians have written histories that speak of five thousand years of language teaching.² And indeed, that seems to be as early as we’ll ever have any information about it because that’s as far back as any historical records go. To start, let’s have a quick look at a timeline of the ancient world, since it can be difficult to grasp the huge expanses of time that we’re talking about.

The Romans are the most recent of the ancient civilizations we’ll examine. When Rome was sacked in AD 476 and the last emperor was deposed, it had been almost exactly one thousand years since the founding of the Roman Republic. The influence of Rome and the Latin language persisted for another millennium, into the Renaissance, but when we think of the glory days of Rome, we’re talking a period of roughly five hundred years, from the third century BC until the third century AD, when barbarian tribes began a series of invasions that would eventually cause the fall of the empire.

Before that, though their dates overlap somewhat with the Romans, there were the Greeks, whose civilization was much admired and emulated by the Romans. Their civilization stretched back to before 1000 BC, but the Greece of Aristotle and the Acropolis was from approximately 600 BC to 300 BC. We’re barely halfway through the five thousand years.

The Egyptian civilization lasted longer than any other, its power enduring from about 3000 BC until approximately 300 BC. At the time the Greeks were just beginning their remarkable achievements in everything from science to literature, the Great Pyramids of Giza had been standing for well over a thousand years.

We’ll look at these three civilizations, but first, if we want to go back as far as possible, we can’t ignore another civilization as old as that of the ancient Egyptians: Mesopotamia.

2

Mesopotamia

The First Records

Six thousand years ago there were already villages in lower Mesopotamia, what is now modern-day Iraq. Over the next thousand years, this prehistoric agricultural society gave rise to what became known as Sumer, which was actually a group of city-states, much like what the Greeks had centuries later. And it was around this time—the best guess is about 3300 BC-that the Sumerians devised the first writing system, marking the beginning of history. So what do you suppose that they wrote about, given the very first opportunity ever to write and to preserve their thoughts for posterity? The heroic and glowing adventures of their ancestors? Religious texts to appease the gods? No, writing was first used for bureaucratic purposes— for recordkeeping, as a tool to keep the administration of government activities running smoothly. Adventure and religion came later.

Now that the Sumerians had a writing system to record transactions, it was necessary for people to learn it. Sumerian schools came into existence in order to create scribes to serve the state. These were no servants, however. Learning to read and write was reserved for the sons of the wealthy and powerful. We know because so many records were left behind that one scholar was able to match the students’ fathers with a sort of Who’s-Who of the day.¹

The writing system that the Sumerians created for their language was originally pictographic; that is, it was similar to the hieroglyphics of Egypt in that words were represented by drawings. Through the following centuries, the symbols were gradually simplified and stylized until they became what is known as cuneiform (from Latin, meaning “in the shape of wedges”). We’ve all seen it somewhere in our schooldays; it was writing that consisted of wedge-shaped symbols made with the tip of a stylus, a pointed writing tool. These characters were pressed into clay that was then left in the sun to dry, making an impressively permanent record. Thousands of these tablets have been found, telling us about all sorts of matters from dull government records of food inventories to news about a spectacular murder case.² There are even countless practice tablets of young students who were learning to write.

Being a first effort, the Sumerian writing system was understandably not the easiest the world has ever seen. It consisted of six hundred or so symbols that represented syllables of the language instead of individual sounds (it was therefore called a syllabary rather than an alphabet). Mastering the system was not easy. Students started by learning the symbols and the sounds they represented as well as some phonetically simple words. The next step was to memorize some common words. These were presented in lists of logically related words such as the names of animals, trees, rocks, and minerals.³ Practice consisted of a lot of copying onto tablets—that’s why there are so many of them. Students in the next stage learned the more difficult words—for example, compound words whose meanings weren’t clear from their individual components. In short, learning to read and write Sumerian was above all a matter of learning thousands of words of vocabulary. It was a long, arduous process that took at least ten years.⁴

By 2350 BC, Sumer had been taken over by the Akkadians, a civilization they had been in close contact with for centuries. The Akkadians were stronger militarily but they certainly were not a more developed society. In fact, the Akkadians held the Sumerians and their culture in the highest regard—so much so that something happened that was contrary to the usual pattern of conqueror and conquered: the Akkadians learned Sumerian, the language of the defeated population. This doesn’t mean that they gave up their own language (which, not coincidentally, was written in cuneiform borrowed from the Sumerians), but Sumerian was seen as the language of education and social achievement.⁵ Still, it was not the language of the ruling Akkadians, so within a few centuries Sumerian did indeed die out as a spoken language. But it certainly didn’t disappear; it remained very much alive as a language for education and religion. And as the Akkadians studied Sumerian, at last we can talk about the first genuine second-language learning and teaching scenario that we know about.

After such a long wait, though, it might be a bit disappointing to hear that we’ve already read how foreign languages were first taught and learned: in just the same way Sumerian was taught to its native speakers. That is, Akkadian students started out by mastering the cuneiform writing system and simple words, then memorizing lists of thousands of words of increasing difficulty. The only innovation was that this created the need for the first bilingual dictionaries of sorts. A Sumerian child would already have known most of the words on his lists. An Akkadian speaker, on the other hand, needed translations of these words (which, of course, tells us that he was already literate in Akkadian), so the lists included the Akkadian word next to it. These sometimes even had illustrations, so if we want, we can consider these to be bilingual illustrated dictionaries—very avant-garde.⁶

So the first evidence we have of the study of a language is from about five thousand years ago as Sumer developed a writing system and had need of people to learn it for governmental purposes. To most people a language is seen as simply a collection of words, so their way of teaching it was what probably most people would do without the benefit of experience: they just learned vocabulary. There was no literature to study and there were no essays to write. When the Akkadians studied Sumerian a thousand years later, they made no distinction between learning a first language and learning a foreign language. It would have been naïve to expect anything more, and in fact this is how it went for a long, long time.

3

Egypt

The Effect of Language Change

As brief as our stop was in Sumer, here it will be even shorter. In fact, when it comes to second-language teaching there isn’t much point in talking about Egypt for the first two thousand years. Or maybe not at all, you may think, because the situation turns out not to be what you’d expect. Nonetheless, it is Egypt and it is three thousand years of history, and that makes it rather hard to ignore. The ancient Egyptians, who spoke what is simply called ancient Egyptian, certainly had good reasons to learn a few foreign languages during all those years. As a major power there obviously was contact with other nations, whether from trade or through diplomacy or conquest. Knowing the other person’s language is clearly a benefit in business. It also is useful in administering an empire, and it’s believed that some Egyptian diplomats learned the language of their host countries.¹ When conquering, though, unlike the Akkadians in Sumer, the Egyptians were perfectly content to follow the natural course of things and have the conquered learn the language of the victors.

Overall, there is sufficient evidence that knowing a second language was not unheard of in ancient Egypt. The title of “chief interpreter” existed in the Old Kingdom, meaning sometime in the mid-third millennium BC.² In addition, there are multilingual documents from as early as roughly 2000 BC, as well as numerous instances of foreign words used in the writings of scribes.³ There are other documents showing communication with outsiders.

The problem is that we have no idea how foreign languages were generally learned in ancient Egypt. There weren’t even schools until 2000 BC, give or take a few hundred years, and it’s thought that foreign languages were not part of the curriculum when there were. The logical possibilities are private lessons from a native speaker or spending time abroad. Either way it indicates that knowing another language was likely to be an achievement of those from well-to-do families, not of typical students.

The first instance of second-language learning in ancient Egyptian schools that we can verify isn’t even really that of a second language. Let’s look first at a situation in English from hundreds of years ago. At some point you may have studied something in Old English (that is, written about a thousand years ago), and you’ll remember how difficult it is to decipher passages like this, the first words of the Bible:

On angynne gescēop God heofonan and eorðan. Sēo eorðe sōðlīce wæs īdel and ǣmtig, and þēostra wǣron over ðǣre nywelnysse brādnysse; and Godes gāst wæs geferod ofer wæteru.⁴

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty. Darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.⁵

Now just imagine how much more difficult it would be if this had been written in a completely different alphabet than the one we use today. No thanks, most of us would probably say. But what if, as this passage hints at, it contained the wisdom of the ages and its memorization was absolutely necessary to be a good citizen? Wouldn’t it be like learning a foreign language? That’s the situation that Egyptian students faced later in their history, long after the pyramids had been built.

The original Egyptian writing system was the hieroglyphics that we’re all so familiar with. This pictographic method, whose name means “sacred carving,” was developed about 3100 BC, soon after the Sumerians came up with cuneiform. It was used for nearly three thousand years (the last known usage was 394 BC)⁶ and was always the script of choice for writing on the stone of monuments and temp...