one result of these social and political circumstances was the emergence of a much greater emphasis on teaching speaking and listening. During the nineteenth century, "opposition to the Grammar-Translation Method gradually developed in several countries". This opposition came to be called the Reform Movement. "For the early reformers... the prioritizing of larger stretches of text, including dialogues, over the study of isolated sentences" became a key principle.

In the era of the Reform Movement, as in first language acquisition, listening was taught first, and "linguists emphasized that speech, rather than the written word, was the primary form of language". There was also an emphasis on phonetics-"the scientific analysis and description of the sound systems of languages