It is important for any discipline, particularly in its early phases, that its historical evolution should be well understood by those involved. Language and culture pedagogy, and foreign language teaching as a specific and major component, is carried out by professionals, by teachers with a professional training.

Training involves acquiring the accepted wisdom and current knowledge and understanding of a discipline, and the practical skills to carry it out, whether this is teaching medicine, law or whatever. Those who are entrusted to professionals, and who put their trust in professionals, do so because they know that they are trained.

Training for law and medicine has long been located in universities, whereas it is in most countries only in relatively recent times that teacher training has been moved there from institutions that specialised in teacher training and did not have the functions of a university.