Mateusz Wiącek

During World War 2 there was an obvious need for the military to speed up the language learning process, so that the personnel could acquire language skills quickly. The audio-lingual…

With the successes of the new language learning methods based on Berlitz’s ”direct method” (also called “natural method”), researchers started thinking about how people actually acquire languages.  The first language…

Cecil Alec Mace is a British philosopher and industrial psychologist, best known for his work on monetary incentives and goal-setting theory. In 1932 he published his book The Psychology of…

At the beginning of the 20th century, teachers and scholars started searching for ways to improve language learning. They were inspired by looking at how children learn languages. They understood…

The developments in the area of phonetics in the 19th century, like the work of the brothers Grimm, led in 1886 to the creation of the International Phonetic Association in…

Hermann Ebbinghaus was a psychologist primarily known for his research in the field of memory. His groundbreaking work focused on understanding the processes of learning and forgetting, and he conducted…

Around the 1870s, French neurologist Paul Broca discovered a region of the brain that was associated with the production of spoken language.  It was the first time in history that…

Ferdinand de Saussure, born in Switzerland in 1857, is regarded as the founder of modern linguistics. He laid the foundation for many of the developments in linguistics in the twentieth…

During the 17th century, the primary purpose of teaching Latin and Greek was not for spoken communication but rather to educate scholars and create “the illusion of deep knowledge”. It…

The 19th century investigated language and learning in more detail. This led to the formal development of linguistics, phonetics, and neurolinguistics, as well as the first-ever formal language learning method,…