This is a book about what matters when you are responsible for the progress of your students: clear guiding principles and effective teaching techniques that keep students engaged both in their work and in their mood. Practicing correctly and communicating vibrantly—both from the very beginning and emerging from one another. Without undermining the achievements of a modern communicative approach, the author consciously draws from a rich Western tradition of language teaching and learning, combining it with contemporary insights from psychology, language acquisition and teaching research, as well as brain research. Suggestions from and for elementary education are included. The result is a revision of the fundamentals: with targeted assistance from the mother tongue, foreign languages can be taught differently and better than before. An optimistic book in pessimistic times, grounded in conviction.