Interlinear translations for language teaching

Interlinear translations (ITs) are a typographical arrangement in which texts written in two languages are interspersed on separate lines, with the words aligned so as to enable the reader to understand a foreign language by following the words on the line below. This article offers a detailed history of ITs as a language teaching method, starting from the earliest written records in the Middle Ages, making an examination of the philosophical precursors around the 1500s. In the subsequent analysis of the commercial development of IT methods during the nineteenth century, particular attention is paid to the principal publishers and to the rationale behind the method. The study concludes with a list of surviving ITs into recent decades, and with hypotheses concerning the reasons for their disappearance from the mainstream methods. This overview fills an important gap in the literature on the history of language teaching.