Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1989. 19/3. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 19)

Kovács, Éva: The History of Teaching Vocabulary

- 120 trainees to arrive at their own judgements and decisions and integrate them in their everyday practice. I. THE OIRECT METHOD The direct method was introduced into modern language teaching at the end of the 19th century. It turned against the grammar translation method of teaching the Greek and Latin languages. One of the most important principles of the direct method is the primacy of the foreign language and the exclusion of the mother tongue with ttie one precondition that monolingual semantizising should he used only when it is not a waste of time and is clear and unambiguous. This method teaches grammar inductively and it was this method which introduced the teaching of phonetics into foreign language teaching. An extremely important requirement is ttie emphasis on oral production and the texts for oral practice should meet ttie pupils' needs and in tores tr. and they should be taken from everyday life. As lar as translation is concerned the representatives of the direct method are divided in their views but most of them object to translation as thinking in the mother tongue is an obstacle to oral production. As we will see later on ttie representatives of the other different, methods adopted and refined guite a lot of ttie methodological principles of the direct method which can still be ragarded valid. Ttie founder of ttie direct method was Wilhelm Victor. Ills main work Is Der Sprachunterricht muss umkehren which was published in 1002. A language lesson is built up by Vietor like this: 1. The pupil hears first only ttie phonetic form of ttie language while his book is closed. 2. After having read ttie text several times ttie teacher semanticizes the unknown words. Vietor recommends ttie combination of ttie following ways of conveying the meaning: the use of - pictures - objects - actions