Language-learning experts (they wer

Language-learning experts (they were not then called applied linguists) responded to this challenge with radical new ideas about how languages should he taught. They advocated a direct method in which the students’ own languages were banished and everything was to be done through the language under instruction. Translation and first-language explanation were banned and the new method enforced, sometimes quite ruthlessly. In the highly successful Berlitz Schools, for example, classroom microphones monitored what teachers were saying, and they could he fired for uttering a single word in a student’s own language. In many ways the direct method classroom, by insisting on one language and outlawing bilingualism, emulated the most repressive of monolingual nations.