No explanations, please!

Jean Jacques Jacotot, a Frenchman from Dijon, became, without intending it, a language teacher and, again without intending it, the inventor of the first monolingual method for the language classroom. After the defeat of Napoleon, Jacotot found himself as an exile in what now is Belgium, where he took up a teaching post at the university of Louvain, in the Flemish-speaking part of the country. He was not a Flemish speaker, and his students were beginners of French. Confronted with this challenge, Jacotot devised his own (highly idiosyncratic) method teaching his students. And found that it worked! He himself was most surprised when he discovered that explanation was actually not necessary. How can you be a language teacher when you cannot explain anything, had been his immediate thought on arriving at Louvain. He then realized that explanation was not only not necessary, it was actually wrong! (Howatt, A.P.R.: A History of English Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984: 150-1)