ARTICLES AND NOTES SEXUALIZING AND GENDERING THE FRENCH TONGUE IN

In their recent history of modern language teaching in England, Jack Richards and Theo-dore Rodgers claim that students in the eighteenth century learned modern languages as they did Latin, ‘studying grammatical rules and translating abstract sentences’; that ‘oral work was minimal’, and that students memorized grammatical rules and applied them ‘to decode written texts in the target language’.1 Yet according to early eighteenth-century author Mary Astell, speaking French had become so popular in her time that almost as many ‘Women of Quality ’ as men spoke French.2 What is more, in his educational trea-tise Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), John Locke argued that ‘the right way of teaching [French] [...] is by talking it into children in constant conversation, and not by grammatical rules’.3 What accounts for the discrepancy between the modern account of learning French in eighteenth-century England and the contemporary evi-dence? How is it possible for Richards and Rodgers to claim that in the early modern period the ‘oral ’ was minimal when contemporary accounts suggest that it was central? This discrepancy is mainly an historiographical issue. Even though no fewer than ‘88 different grammars, dictionaries and methods ’ for teaching the French language wer