This study provides a much-needed socio-political perspective on language teaching in Turkey and identifies key influences and orthodoxies past and present and their impact on current practices of language learning. The researchers provide a refreshing critique of successive cycles of policies and how they have variously sought to secure starting with imperial, nationalist, and contemporary populist ambitions of language teaching in the classroom and beyond. Almost 150 years of such efforts have frequently shoehorned teaching practices with inevitable consequences for language acquisition from primary education to university. Along with the contemporary educational changes before and after the foundation of the Turkish Republic, the researchers aim to shed light on the chronological records of language teacher education by drawing parallelism between general teacher education and language teacher education in Turkey. The paper concludes with suggestions for improving our understanding of present-day challenges in a field that remains fundamental to the future of the country.