Naturally invented texts?

Henry Sweet, the man who ‘taught phonetics to Europe’, is less well known as the author of  The Practical Study of Languages, a book which made him the orgininator of applied linguistics to the teaching of languages. Sweet recognised one basic problem: if texts embody certain grammatical categories, they cannot be natural; if they are natural, they cannot be brought into any relationship to grammar. His solution was to rely on the skill of the textbook writer to produce natural texts which were simple enough to be comprehensible to elementary learners but would not distort the language. He did not favour ‘natural’ methods, based on conversation in the classroom. The process of learning one’s mother tongue was carried on under peculiarly favourable circumstances and could not be reproduced in the language classroom. Spoken interaction, he believed, was not the starting-point but the end-point of classroom instruction. So his claim ‘spoken language first’ does not mean what it would mean today. (Howatt, A.P.R.: A History of English Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984: 186-7)