What are the goals of language teaching? Who should learn a foreign language and when? Which methodologies are most efficacious in producing the desired outcomes? These questions have been revisited over many centuries of language teaching; provocative responses are not lacking. In this book, I highlight the lively exchanges that shaped foreign-language pedagogy and educational policy during the first fifty years of the twentieth century. My primary interest is the first two years of university study, the period of the long-established “language requirement”.