| Summary: | Since the early 1900s, a controversy has existed among educational psychologists concerning the relative merits of the so-called "direct" and "indirect" methods of second-language teaching. The indirect method, widely used in public schools, involves learning the new language vocabulary by translation, through the presentation of foreign words together with their semantic equivalents in the native language. The direct method, favored by many theorists, is intended to approximate the method of learning a first language. Ideally, the native language is not used at all; new words are associated directly with environmental events or learned through the second-language context in which they appear.
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