Henry Sweet (1845-1912), an outstanding British linguist, is credited with "taught phonetics to Europe" (Howatt:181) Huge reputation; an advocate of the foreign language teaching reform movement in the late 19th century and a foreign language educator.

Sweat's academic career is divided into two periods. In the previous period, he was mainly engaged in applied phonetics and ancient English research. In 1877, he published his first important work, "Handbook of Phonetics". In the latter period, Sweet was mainly engaged in research on foreign language teaching. In his own words: "applying living philology to actual language teaching" (Howatt: 189). During this period, he published the most important and influential book "Practical Language Learning" in his life.

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The background of the development of British language:

Linguistics after the 1930s was influenced by Saussure and regarded language as a Study the complete system. However, due to different entry points and emphases, the basic theories of each faction are also different. For example, several European linguistic schools pay more attention to the energy and symbolism of language; American structuralism pays more attention to formal analysis and objective description; transformational generative grammar studies language from a psychological perspective; and British linguists Then pay more attention to the situations in which language appears, and study language from a sociological perspective.

The UK has a long tradition of studying linguistics, especially phonetics. As early as before the Renaissance in the 15th and 16th centuries, ancient Latin was still commonly used in continental Europe, and when languages ??other than Latin, such as English and other national languages, were ridiculed as colloquialisms, the study of English had aroused strong interest in Britain itself. Phonology, lexicography and other studies that met the requirements of standardization were developed first.

HowNet-A Review of Henry Sweet’s Thoughts on Foreign Language Teaching