It is easy to think of communicative language teaching as a late 20th-century invention. Pairwork, role-play, authentic materials and the idea that language exists primarily for communication are often associated with the classroom revolutions of the 1970s and 1980s. But the roots of that shift run much deeper. In fact, many of the arguments we now consider “modern” were already present in late nineteenth-century discourse around education.
That earlier shift was the Reform Movement in modern foreign language teaching – a remarkably modern-seeming turn in thinking around language education. Emerging across Europe in the 1880s, it represented a serious intellectual challenge to the long-dominant Grammar–Translation Method and laid down principles that still feel strikingly familiar today.
The problem with Grammar–Translation
Throughout most of the nineteenth century, language teaching in schools entailed grammatical drills, vocabulary lists and translation exercises. Lessons typically revolved around written texts, often literary, with little attention paid to pronunciation, listening or spontaneous speech. The method had clear roots in classical language education, where the goal was access to texts rather than communicative ability.
Now, as much as this helps learners get to grips with the rules of language – I love the systematicity of those old courses, myself – the problem was that this approach was increasingly out of step with social reality. As travel, trade and international communication expanded, learners wanted usable language, not just intellectual knowledge about language. Students could often analyse complex sentences yet struggled to understand or produce even basic spoken forms. By the 1870s and 1880s, frustration with this mismatch was becoming more openly voiced.
The Reform Movement and the rise of “living language”
Now, the Reform Movement that rallied against this method was not a single organisation. Rather, it was a loose, unaffiliated network of linguists, teachers and educational thinkers across Europe who shared similar concerns. What united them was the conviction that language teaching should centre on modern language in use, rather than the continuity of age-old classroom tradition for its own sake.
Where there’s a particularly pertinent crossover for me, working in dialect research, is with one of its most prominent British figures – one Henry Sweet, a pioneering phonetician and linguist. Sweet argued that language teaching should focus on the present, and informed by scientific linguistic knowledge, particularly phonetics. Learners, he believed, needed systematic exposure to spoken language and accurate pronunciation from the start, rather than being left to infer sounds from spelling.
Other prominent theorists were making similar arguments elsewhere. In Germany, Wilhelm Viëtor famously declared that modern language teaching was in a state of crisis, calling for a radical break with grammar-translation. In France, Paul Passy, one of the founders of the International Phonetic Association, promoted phonetic training and naturalistic exposure to speech. Across these contexts, common principles began to emerge.
Spoken language should be prioritised alongside reading and writing. Pronunciation matters and should form its own, explicit part of the curriculum. Learning should progress from simple, high-frequency language to more complex forms. It was best to learn a language through meaningful, communicative activity, not only through analysis.
These ideas did not overturn educational systems overnight, but they represented a genuine conceptual shift. Practitioners viewed language increasingly as a practical tool, not merely an object of scholarly study.
From the 1880s to the communicative turn of the 1980s
What makes the Reform Movement particularly interesting is how closely its goals align with those of the later communicative turn in language teaching almost a century later.
By the mid-20th century, many school systems had once again become dominated by structural syllabi and form-focused teaching, even where newer methods such as audiolingualism – remember those Linguaphone courses? – had temporarily emphasised speech. Yet the same familiar problem persisted: learners were spending years studying languages without developing functional communicative ability.
In the 1970s and 1980s, applied linguistics began to offer new theoretical tools for articulating what earlier reformers had intuited. The concept of communicative competence, associated with scholars such as Dell Hymes and later Canale and Swain, argued that knowing a language involves far more than grammatical accuracy. It includes the ability to use language appropriately in social contexts, to manage interaction, and to interpret meaning and intention.
This thinking led directly to the growth of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT): classrooms built around tasks, interaction, negotiation of meaning and real-world language use. What changed in the 1980s was not so much the underlying aspiration, but the intellectual and institutional support behind it. Applied linguistics had matured, classroom research had expanded, and globalisation had increased the practical demand for communicative proficiency.
Seen in this light, the communicative turn of the 1980s looks less like a sudden revolution and more like a return to those long-standing questions. Many of the core critiques voiced by communicative theorists echo those of Sweet, Passy and Viëtor – that teachers should privilege real usage, that speech matters, and that learners need opportunities to use language meaningfully.
Why this history still matters
So, there’s nothing new under the sun (or Intet er nytt under solen, as Åse Kleveland famously sang at the 1966 Eurovision Song Contest – honestly, there’s a Eurovision reference for everything!). Understanding this longer history helps to challenge the idea that language teaching progresses in a neat, linear way from “old-fashioned” to “modern”. Instead, the field tends to cycle through recurring tensions: form versus meaning, analysis versus use, system versus communication. The Reform Movement shows that concerns about authenticity, speech and learner experience are not new innovations but part of a conversation stretching back well over a century.
For teachers and learners today, this perspective can be reassuring. Many of the instincts that feel pedagogically sound now were already being articulated in the 1880s. The tools and terminology have changed, but the underlying question remains remarkably consistent: not simply how language is structured, but how it is lived. It’s also a nice reminder of how thoroughly modern the Victorians appear – at times!
