Language Teaching Approaches

I really liked learning about the history of language teaching.  The article states that, "one reason for the frequent changes that have been taking place until recently is the fact that very few language teachers have even the vaguest sense of history about their profession and are unclear concerning the historical bases of the many methodological options they currently have at their disposal."  This was a great point.  I never actually thought about how important the history of language teaching is.  The article goes on to state how there before 2000, there were two approaches to languag teaching: using language and analyzing language (which focuses on grammar and we know how well that goes).  While in many of my TESOL classes, we've learned about English as lingua franca.  I thought it was interesting to hear about Greek and then Latin as the lingua francas during the Classical Greek and Medieval periods.  I think that some of the reasons that people learned these two languages can be similar to some of the reasons proposed to use Standard English; politics, business, philosophy and religion.  The educated became fluent in these languages, which is also what Standard English is known to be used by.  The Direct Method, having the goal as to use the language rather than analyze it, seems so obvious to me (for that to be the goal).  I can't imagine learning a language just so that I could analyze it.  There were so many contributions from several different people to spread this method that I was amazed.  It seems like this method was the one to start the major changes in language teaching, which I can probably say for all of us, we're grateful for.