Jean-Antoine Caravolas, professor at the Faculty of Education of the University of Montréal, and a well-known expert on Comenius, is ambitious (and courageous) enough to attempt writing a comprehensive treatment of the history of foreign language teaching in Europe and North America between 1450 and today, in all the major languages and countries. He presents a first volume and announces two more (18th and 19th century, 20th century). Altogether there will be three volumes of what Caravolas calls the précis d'histoire accompanied by three companion volumes providing an anthology for the relevant texts.
Measured against this vast undertaking, there are relatively few remarks introducing the book. The author states that a historiographical work like this is missing, although "L'apprentissage des langues étrangères est une activité aussi vieille que l'humanité" (xix). He also maintains that contemporary world-wide endeavours to conduct foreign language teaching research, vis-à-vis the general social needs of foreign language learning in the present-day world, demand the background knowledge of their own history. As a name for the academic discipline(s) that deal(s) with foreign language teaching, he adopts the term didactique ('didactics') after certain 17th-century German pedagogues (like Alsted or Rathke) and after Comenius. Its meaning, however, is taken from the present-day use of the term in France. "Généralement, elle désigne cette discipline qui s'occupe de la théorie de l'enseignement et de l'apprentissage des langues, de l'éboration de programmes et d'outils didactiques pour cet enseignement et cet apprentissage ainsi que de méthodes adaptées à cette théorie et à ces outils. Elle s'appuie sur les acquisitions des disciplines scientifiques qui ont quelque rapport avec la didactique des langues, en particuliers la linguistique, la psychologie et la pédagogie." (xx, after Galisson 1988) Very much in the same way, the German term Fremdsprachendidaktik is used today (Christ and Hüllen 1995). This means that an academic field, as delimited by present-day concepts and functions, is projected as an ordering schema into the past with the intention of showing that what we today call X has, in the eye of the author, already existed for many centuries, whether then designated as X or not. This procedure is certainly useful for finding a cover-term applicable to all texts between 1450 and the present which are going to be presented, but it is nevertheless not without its problems. Although Caravolas does not discuss these problems, they should at least be mentioned. His procedure certainly creates the danger of levelling out the historical particularities of the past and making them appear in the anachronistic light of the present. But, as mentioned above, the author does not discuss these methodological intricacies (to which I will return below) and carries his work out with all the confidence and the responsibility of a genuine historian: "Nous avons donc jugé nécessaire de montrer la contribution des grands et des petits pays, des auteurs universellement connus et de ceux injustement oubliés. L'originalité des ideés étant une qualité extrêmement rare, nous avons pris comme critères principaux la solidité théorique ou la valeur pratique de chaque apport et son rôle dans le progrès de la discipline au niveau national ou international" (xxv).
Only one major problem of method had to be decided upon before putting the book together, viz. whether the chronologically ordered presentation should or should not be broken down according to countries. The author decided in favour of the first possibility because "Les mêmes causes ne produisent pas dans tous les pays les mêmes effets, au mêmes moment et avec la même force" (xxiii). He quotes G. A. Padley's book on the Western grammatical tradition as a model worthy to be followed. (I will return to this decision later, too.)
Caravolas' approach leads to the following division:
I. Les débuts de la pédagogie des langues (i.e. the pre-European beginnings of language didactics in various European and non-European countries), II. L'enseignement et l'apprentissage des langues en Italie, III -- en Angleterre, IV. -- en Allemagne, V. -- en France, VI. -- aux Pays-Bas, VII. -- en Espagne et au Portugal, VIII. -- dans les autres pays européens.
The "other countries" of chapter VIII are: Les pays scandinaves, La Pologne, La Russie, La Bohême, La Hongrie. Chapters II to VIII begin each with 1. Aperçu historique and 2. La situation dans le domaine de l'education, and then go on to 3. L'enseignement des langues anciennes and 4. L'enseignement des language vivantes. There are two more chapters where the author abandons his country-oriented approach: IX. Les jésuites et l'enseignement et l'apprentissage des langues, and X. Jan Amos Comenius-premier théoricien de la didactique des langues.
For a closer inspection I choose chapter III: L'enseignement et l'apprentissage des langues en Angleterre (pp. 65-120). The aperçu historique (three pages) gives the basic facts of the late-medieval history of Tudor and Stuart Britain and the post-revolutionary period. It also mentions the main figures of Renaissance culture (Wyclif, Chaucer, Colet, Lily, Linacre, Thomas More and the visitors Vives and Erasmus, moreover Shakespeare, Hartlib, Milton and the Royal Society). Not everybody will accept this selection of names (I find that Hartlib is overestimated in this context and that Bacon is missing), but they form a general backdrop for the scene to come. So do the general remarks on education (one page), which deal with the subordinate role of the mother-tongue in linguistic training and the special kind of grammar schools on the country. There then follow deliberations on the teaching of the ancient languages - at the beginning Latin, at the end also, with only a few remarks, Greek and Hebrew (pp. 70-93). After one paragraph on the medieval tradition, the Latin part discusses (i) the teaching of grammar by rules, (ii) the teaching of grammar without rules, and (iii) the teaching of speaking (pronouncing) and writing. These three topics are dealt with mainly by information about Lily's Grammar, then by ideas from the works of Richard Mulcaster, John Brinsley and William Walker, of Roger Ascham and Sir Thomas Elyot, the members of the Hartlib circle, i.e. William Brookes, Hezekiah Woodward, John Milton, and Joseph Webbe, and finally by ideas from the works of Charles Hoole, Richard Carew, and John Locke. Some of these authors are allocated only a third of a page, some the space of up to two pages. Ascham, Brinsley, Hoole and Milton are mentioned and elaborated upon several times.
Deliberations on the teaching of modern languages (pp. 94-120) first focus on general phenomena (7.5 pages) like the English-French bilingualism in the country after 1066, the reasons for learning foreign languages in the succeeding centuries, the impact of foreign speaker immigration into Britain in the wake of the Counter-Reformation on the continent, and the so-called grand or petit tour. There then follow the sections on the teaching manuals and the teachers of French (ten pages), of Italian (2.5 pages), and of Spanish plus German (together two pages). 'Manuals' are grammars, dictionaries, integrated textbooks with grammars and dictionaries included plus dialogues, literary texts, etc., and finally other texts, like proverbs. In the French part, the well-known Neckam, Garland and Biblesworth appear, although they lived before the time to which the book is devoted, and some of the authors mentioned earlier are picked up again (e.g. Milton and Webster). Besides John Palsgrave; Claude de Sainliens (Holyband), John Woodroephe, Claude Mauger, and Guy Miège are treated extensively for French, and John (Michelangelo) Florio for Italian. Richard Percyvall and John Minsheu are mentioned (not treated) for Spanish, Martin Aedler and Henry Offelen for German. Moreover, about twenty-five more names are listed as those of manual authors, either only with their book-titles or with one-sentence-statements.
There is a final remark on universal languages (eight lines), and a general résumé: "On devise d'habitude les methodiciens des langues en deux groupes: ceux qui enseignent par l'usage et ceux qui enseignent par regles. Bathe (1611) y ajoute un troisième groupe où il classe les partisans du compromis, les éclectiques" (117). John Locke is offered as a member of the first, John Palsgrave as one of the second group. Four authors represent the eclectics with an accent on 'use' (Duwes, du Ploiche, La Mothe, and Minsheu), and five authors the eclectics with an accent on 'rules' (Maupas, Woodroephe, Miège, Paravicino, and Boyer). The chapter finishes with a paragraph (one page) on William Aufeild, a didactien inconnu, who translated the grammar of Charles Maupas into English and developed a special approach including general information on the language which had to precede the actual learning process, and oral practice.
There are good reasons to assume that this chapter is representative of the seven chapters (II to VIII) that make the main body of the book and that the text is correct in its reasoning and its factual information, apart from a few exceptional details which will be mentioned below. How do we judge the book, then, as a contribution to the historiography of foreign language teaching history?
First of all, there is the stupendous mass of material. The bibliography counts more than 550 primary sources in all major languages of Europe. Here, a single author obviously shoulders a load of work which is otherwise laid on whole teams. And he promises to do the same for the following centuries, in which the numbers of sources to be consulted will certainly not become less. Neither does he exclude the paper of only four pages by Richard Carew which Hartlib included, together with texts by Lubinus and Montaigne, in a publication of 1654, nor does he forget the widely unknown [...] High-Dutch Minerva by Martin (A)Edler, the first German grammar written in English, even if he quotes the second edition of 1685 instead of the first of 1680 (Hüllen 1997). Although the printed space that can be allocated to each author is naturally very limited, the reader feels well informed. Quite often skilfully selected quotations give a direct impression of the historical work. Condensed almost to the size of a specialised dictionary, the individual chapters together build up a panorama of information without losing the easy readability which dictionaries do not have. This is due to the fact that the information is organised according to principles which the reader recognises as of permanent and even present-day importance. To them belong such questions as how to teach grammar, the effect of rule-formation, the effect of language use, the ways of teaching speaking and writing, etc.
But this is also the locus of a methodological problem. It is interesting to see, for example, how close Charles Webbe's chunking of sentences is to modern pattern practice. It is equally interesting to find the nowadays so-called four skills (i.e. listening, speaking, reading, and writing) applied to the didactic ideas of the 17th century. But is this really anything more than a superficial similarity here and in other cases? Pattern practice had to do with psychological behaviourism, with structural linguistics, and with the instrumental means of the audio-oral method. It also had to do with the notion of 'communicative competence'. None of this pertains to Webbe. The so-called four skills are embedded in the present-day use of foreign languages and, for example, disregard translation, which however was all-important in the past. We find very much the same problem in the many dialogues of the 17th-century manuals which Caravolas, of course, mentions but which may have served a didactic purpose quite different from the one which dialogues in modern manuals are meant to serve, e.g. the learning of vocabulary and not of spontaneous speech or face-to-face communication (in modern terms).
Moreover, under the heading Apprendre à écrir John Withals' English-Latin dictionary according to subjects is mentioned as an example. (Unfortunately, the title of the book is misquoted in the text as well as in the list of references. Instead of A Dictionary in English and Latin (1554) it should read A shorte dictionarie for yonge begynners (1553).) Such dictionaries were popular all over Europe at the time (Hüllen 1994) and served the purpose of vocabulary learning. There is no reason to assume that they had any connection at all with the teaching of writing. They are given no special attention in Caravolas' historiography, obviously because they have almost totally disappeared in modern language didactics and, thus, have no place in the ordering system of his book. From these old nomenclators we can infer that learning, i.e. the central process of acquiring a language, was thought of as something different from what it is thought of now. It was something like 'memorisation according to topical (i.e. semantical) principles', a category of learning which is almost totally lost today. Modern foreign language teaching has almost totally substituted paradigmatic memorisation of linguistic items by syntagmatic memorisation. This also pertains to the dialogues mentioned above whose skeleton is in many cases a collection of words ordered in semantic domains, very much in the way of a subject-oriented dictionary. It is highly dangerous to judge such historical means of teaching with modern didactic categories.
These reservations do not pertain to the information given in Caravolas' book as such but to the way in which it is arranged and evaluated, a way which may do harm to its historical faithfulness. Admittedly, also the listing of authors and book-titles occasionally deteriorates into simple name dropping, which only confirms the knowledge of those who know anyway. This is, for example, the case in the paragraph on universal languages. On the other hand, in spite of the masses of material, one sometimes misses books and authors whose historical importance seems obvious. A case in point is William Caxton's Dialogues in French and English (1483), which have been given only a three-line footnote in the chapter on the Netherlands (248). This is, however, a book of seminal importance, because it picks up the Gesprächsbüchlein and Livre des mestiers, widely known in the area of the Lower Rhineland and what today is the Netherlands since about 1370 and transfers it to England, where it gained a singular importance for the many dialogue-books to come. Most of the scenes in these dialogue-books are prefigured in Caxton's translation (Hüllen 1995). However, in spite of such border-cases the information of the book is exhaustive and very useful.
The case of Caxton is also a good point to discuss Caravolas' decision on a division of his book according to countries.
The chapter on the Netherlands, for example, has the same general order as outlined above. It gives ample information on general and author-centred facts. It differentiates in the space devoted to sections according to the importance of authors (an aspect which is occasionally missing elsewhere), for example, by reserving not less than nine pages to Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (235-44). In the section on the teaching of French in the Netherlands, the Livre des mestiers (about 1340) is mentioned together with its translation into English by Caxton (1483) in just one sentence and the footnote, already mentioned, but what we do not learn is that the Livre is a successful book of conversations which was extant in Low-German, Flemish, Dutch and English versions, each juxtaposed with French. The reason is presumably that it did not fit into the ordering of the book according to countries. Another example of the same problematic kind is Noel de Berlaimont's (Barlaimont's) Flemish-French vocabulary of 1530 (and presumably even earlier). Caravolas writes correctly: "Ce petit volume de dialogues pour apprentissage du français connut un immense succès dans toute l'Europe. Des générations entières apprirent avec ce manuel les principales langues européennes, l'ouvrage ayant été publié en d'innombrables éditions multilingues" (257). The author pays tribute to this fact, whose general estimation is perfectly correct, only by mentioning Berlaimont in the sections on teaching French and English in the Netherlands, on teaching Latin and Spanish in Germany, and on teaching French, Spanish and Italian in France. However, between the first known edition in 1530 and 1700 about 100 editions with eventually eight languages printed side by side had appeared. They included Latin (as a language of communication as the Humanists wanted to teach it) and also Slavonic languages like Polish and Bohemian (Czech). They were printed mainly in the Dutch speaking area, but in fact also in almost every printing shop on the continent. This means that Caravolas should have mentioned Berlaimont in every single section of every chapter of his book devoted to the various countries. A principle like this defeats itself, and the author did right in not being so pedantic. What he was consequently bound to miss, however, is showing that in the 16th and 17th centuries whole textbook-families originated which spread all over Europe and carried the same method of teaching and even the same semantic contents of vocabulary and texts into the various linguistic areas. This shows that teaching foreign languages was not a national, but a European affair then, and that Europe was not dissected into autonomous language areas as it would be later. Another textbook-family which gives us the same insight is Adam of Rottweil's Introito e porta (1477), originally written in German and Italian and later to be found all over Europe in a complex filiation of editions, often anonymous, with differing titles and with (again) up to eight languages printed in parallels (Hüllen 1997). Caravolas lists the original edition in his bibliography as 'anonymous' and with the title Vochabulista, which however is the title of one of the many derivatives of the original. The problem of the arrangement according to countries, as it becomes apparent now, is that it identifies historical circumstances with the rather modern notion of 'country' which causes countless overlappings and even so does not do justice to the European, i.e. trans-national, character of foreign language teaching at least up to the end of the 17th century. It does not do justice to languages in every case, either. For example, in the absence of a linguistic standard variety, Germany, which anyway was not a country in any possible sense of the word, was then a region of two distinct languages, viz. what today would be called Niederdeutsch and Oberdeutsch, with the former reaching into the regions of the southern 'Low-Dutch' (Flemish) and the northern 'Low-Dutch' (Dutch). In the 17th century, Dutch, in accordance with its etymology, meant (Nieder-) Deutsch irrespective of political boundaries.
How Caravolas lets himself be led into these almost insoluble problems can be shown in the case of Adrianus Junius. His Nomenclator omnium rerum [...], one of the most important books of the time, appeared in 1567. It had Latin lemmata and explanations with Greek, German, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish and occasionally English equivalents. With eight editions until 1600, and many more later, the book was very successful. In 1585 there appeared a Latin-English-French version by John Higgins in London. The erudite book saw several shortened editions adapted for school teaching in German, Latin and French by Siber (1570), Schenck (1571), Golius (1579), and Chytraeus (1582). There was a Czech translation by Weleslavin (1586). The Siber-version appeared in Leipzig and Wittenberg, the Schenck-version in Augsburg, the Golius-version appeared in Strasbourg and the Weleslavin-version in Prague (according to Claes 1977, 133). Where to put a book like this in a country-orientated presentation depended on the leading question: which foreign language was taught? Yet, Junius' encyclopedic dictionary was a manual of European importance and ought to be treated with prominence.
Naturally, the two last chapters of Caravolas preçis d'histoire do not have to struggle with such difficulties. Teaching and learning foreign languages, i.e. in fact Latin, Greek, and French, according to the Jesuit regulations is discussed for all the countries in which this Catholic order settled. In its more general report on eccliastical politics and in the more specific sketches of the works of François Pomey and Laurent Chiflet it is a convincing picture of a manner of foreign language teaching hardly treated anywhere else. In his chapter on Jan Amos Comenius, "[le] premier théoricien de la didactique des langues", Caravolas is perhaps at his best. In a tightly knit thread of thoughts he leads the reader safely through the works of this prolific writer who has driven many a historian into despair by his method of philosophising and fusing theological, philosophical, linguistic, and didactic ideas. There are many introductions to Comenius' work, but these twenty pages or so belong to the best that have been written from the point of view of language teaching and learning.
Jean-Antoine Caravolas has certainly written a most impressive book on the history of language teaching methodology and practice. He succeeds fully in showing the reader that from 1450 on (and even earlier) and up to 1700 people have reflected on why and how to teach foreign tongues to each young generation. Although not appearing as such in the topics of the trivium and quadrivium, except under 'grammar' and 'rhetoric', it was of equal importance to the topics mentioned there. It is a great success to have shown this. My queries as to the methods of ordering and presenting the masses of material are ultimately dictated by the ever unsolved problem of how to re-construct the past with the epistemological and linguistic means of the present, a problem inherent in every historiographic work (Hüllen 1996).
The Anthologie I. À l'ombre de Quintilien is a very useful and illustrative companion volume to the préçis d'histoire. It consists of 103 bio-bibliographic entries on the authors quoted. They vary in length according to the historical weight of the persons. Then follows the Anthologie thématiques de la didactique des langues, which is strictly ordered by topics and questions as they are discussed by present-day foreign language didactics. They are: (1) Apprendre une languge étrangère, (2) Enseigner une langue maternelle, (3) Le rôle de la langue maternelle, (4) Le rôle de la memoire, (5) Quoi enseigner?, (6) Le problème de la grammaire, (7) La correction des fautes, (8) Le rôle d'élève, (9) Le rôle du maître, (10) Apprendre le vocabulaire, (11) Apprendre à lire la langue étrangère, (12) Apprendre à écrir la langue étrangère, (13) Apprendre à parler la langue étrangère, (14) Apprendre à prononcer la langue étrangère, (15) Autres questions. The quotations are of varying length, from a few lines to about half a page in dense print. The frequency with which authors appear in each of the fifteen chapters varies greatly. Comenius takes the lead, because he is to be found in all of them (fifteen), Quintilian in fourteen, Ratke in twelve, Erasmus in eleven, Locke, Marnix and Ratio atque institutio studiorum societas Jesu each in nine, Vives in eight, Ascham, Clinard, and Lancelot each in seven, Montaigne and Piélat each in six, Bathe, Hoole, Lancy, Lubinus, and Miège in five, and Maupas and Veneroni each in four. Thirteen authors appear in three chapters, eighteen in two, and fifty-five in only one. This is quite an uneven distribution with twenty authors appearing fifteen to four times, and eighty-six three times to once. It shows that the author does not want to present authors but indeed topics. This intention is underlined by the fact that each chapter (except one) starts with an extract out of Quintilian and then orders all quotations alphabetically by authors' names.
The reason for the position of precedence attributed to Quintilian is found in his historical importance: "La découverte du manuscript complet de l'institution oratoire par Poggio Bracciolini en 1416 et la publication de tout le texte pour la première fois en 1470 marquent un tournant dans l'histoire de la didactique des langues. Tous les didacticiens de la Renaissance sans exception se réfèrent à Marcus Fabius Quintilianus comme en l'autorité suprême en matière pédagogique et s'en inspirent dans leurs écrits ou dans leur travail avec les élèves" (xiii).
There is no clue as the use which the author intends for the anthology. The texts can be used as the points of departure for lectures and for seminars and discussion groups. For them they provide an almost unlimited wealth of historical ideas. The texts can also be read parallel to the appropriate chapters in the other volume. In this case it would be an excellent help if cross-references could be inserted in both directions and in both books. Let this be a suggestion for a second edition which these two volumes undoubtedly deserve.
Christ, Herbert, and Werner Hüllen. 1995. "Fremdsprachendidaktik", in K.R. Bausch, H. Christ, W. Hüllen und H.J. Krumm (eds.): Handbuch Fremdsprachen-unterricht. 3rd edition, ed. by K.R. Bausch, H. Christ und H.J. Krumm, Tübingen: Francke, 1-7.
Claes, Franz. 1977. Bibliographisches Verzeichnis der deutschen Vokabulare und Wörterbücher. Hildesheim: Olms.
Galisson, Robert. 1988. "Éloge de la didactologie / didactique des langes et cultures (maternelles et étrangères)", Bulletin d l'ACLA, 10, 1, 9-24.
Hüllen, Werner. 1994. "A Great Chain of Words: The Onomasiological Tradition in English Lexicography", in G. Blaicher and B. Glaser (eds.): Anglistentag 1993 Eichstätt. Proceedings. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 32-46.
Hüllen, Werner. 1995. "A Close Reading of William Caxton's Dialogues '...to lerne Shortly frenssh and englyssh'", in A.H. Jucker (ed.): Historical Pragmatics. Pragmatic Developments in the History of English. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 99-124.
Hüllen, Werner. 1996. "Schemata der Historiographie", Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft 6.1, 113-125.
Hüllen, Werner. 1997. "Wer schrieb die erste deutsche Grammatik in englischer Sprache?", in M. Reinhardt and Wolfgang Thiele (eds.): Grammar and Text in Synchrony and Diachrony. In Honour of Gottfried Graustein. Franfurt: Vervuert Iberoamerikana, 179-194.
Werner Hüllen, Essen