Jean-Antoine Caravolas
[1]. Précis d'histoire I. 1450-1700.

Montréal: Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal / Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1994. [Giessener Beiträge zur Fremdsprachendidaktik]. xxvi + 432pp. ISBN 2-7606-1618-5 (PUM), 3-8233-4366-1 (NARR) DM 78.00.

[2]La didactique des langues. Anthologie I. À l'ombre de Quintilien

Montréal: Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal / Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1994. [Giessener Beiträge zur Fremdsprachendidaktik]. xv + 274pp. ISBN 2-7606-1619-3 (PUM), 3-8233-4367-X (NARR). DM 58.00.

In this two-volume set, William Mackey recalls the old saw "Those who ignore the past are condemned to repeat it", and comments on its particular applicability to the history of language teaching. However, after sifting through the many variants on the debates over the efficacy of rules in language teaching, the 'direct method', and all the other recurring themes, one has to conclude that knowledge of the past is no safeguard against repeating it. Perhaps the endlessly recycled debates in language pedagogy are simply a reflection of the fact that students have different learning styles, just as teachers have different teaching styles, and multiple approaches are needed simply to satisfy natural human variation. To paraphrase another great teacher, "The poor [students] will always be with us"; all the methodological tricks gathered in four millennia of language instruction are needed to bring the maximum number of students to the level of competence desired.

This richly documented history of language teaching in Renaissance Europe provides countless examples of the immense variety of instructional styles. In Volume I Caravolas presents, after a rapid summary of language instruction in antiquity, a more detailed exposition of language teaching in each national setting from the dawn of printing to 1700. The beginning date is determined by the technological advance that rapidly extended literacy and contact with foreign languages; the justification for the endpoint is rather vague, with the promise of clarification when future volumes are produced.

Caravolas is more explicit about why he has chosen a nation-by-nation approach. Inspired by Padley's history of grammatical thought in Europe from 1500-1700, the author finds that a purely chronological approach misses important localized influences, and threatens to hide the important contributions of smaller countries.

The chapters devoted to individual countries include Italy, England, Germany, France, the Low Countries, Spain and Portugal, with one chapter covering Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. To these are added two more specialized chapters, one on the role of the Jesuits in language teaching, and another on an influential individual, the remarkable Jan Amos Comenius.

Within each chapter concerning nations, the author offers a brief historical overview, both general and relating specifically to language education, and then a discussion of the teaching of ancient languages and modern languages. In each of these the contributions of a number of individual language teachers and grammar writers are briefly summarized.

This structure to Volume I makes it easy to situate individual authors within the national traditions, but it hides, to a certain extent, the main themes in pedagogical debates and separates rather arbitrarily the teaching of the classical languages from the teaching of the modern languages. Volume II is meant to correct the thematic problem, as it presents excerpts from teaching manuals on fifteen topics: learning a foreign language, teaching one's native language, the role of the students' native language in language teaching, memorization, what to teach, the efficacy of grammatical rules, correction of student errors, the role of the student, the role of the teacher, learning vocabulary, reading a foreign language, writing a foreign language, speaking a foreign language, pronouncing a foreign language, and a catch-all section treating such issues as the appropriate age to start learning a foreign language. The selections in Volume II are organized alphabetically, with the exception of comments by Quintilian, which are placed at the beginning of each chapter. The collection of excerpts is preceded by a section of brief biographical notices on the authors cited.

The major difficulty for such a sweeping work is clearly one of organization, and satisfying the variety of ways in which the reader might want to consult the book, and the types of connections that any scholar would want to understand. Language pedagogy is a richly interwoven tradition, between nations, between the teaching of different languages, between language theory and instructional approach, and many other possibilities. It is an area meant for hypertext, not linear presentation. Trying to represent this complexity in the linear constraints of the book requires compromises, and the compromises that Caravolas has made are generally sufficient. Still, a thematic or chronological order rather than an alphabetical one might have been preferable within each chapter of Volume II, for it would have highlighted influences, connections and conflicts between the authors on various points.

The breadth of coverage that Caravolas has undertaken leads inevitably to a certain degree of superficiality, and the final two chapters of Volume I (on the Jesuits and on Comenius) are ultimately more satisfying intellectually because here he has brought more order to the whole, and here he has been able to keep up with all the current research. Within the 'national' chapters, it is clear which works he has been able to read first hand, and which he knows only through (sometimes outdated) secondary scholarship. In the chapters on England, for example, the reliance on Watson (1908) and Lambley (1920), as informative as those sources are, needs to be complemented with more recent work, and one is surprised by the absence of any references to the many relevant articles and books of N. Orme, W. Rothwell and T. Hunt, among others. Still, the bibliography includes a wealth of material and provides an excellent starting point for future research in the area.

These comments should not take anything away from the accomplishment of these paired volumes. Through them we can contextualize many of the language theories of the period. Although Caravolas explicitly states that he is not writing a 'history of linguistics' in the period, the (overdrawn) distinction between linguistic theory and applied linguistics in our modern period did not exist in the 16th and 17th century, and the important figures in language pedagogy include the same scholars we commonly treat in the history of linguistics, and properly extends our vision to a number of others. This is a fascinating and useful set of books, and I look forward to the appearance of subsequent volumes on the 18th and 19th centuries.

Douglas A. Kibbee, Urbana