In 1892-1893, he studied in France.
Especially he dedicated himself to Oral Method. He stayed in Japan for 14 years and reformed its English education. He contributed to the development of the applied linguistics of the 20th century.
In 1902, he went to Belgium and started teaching English at Berlitz school.
In 1903, he established his own school. In 1915, he started teaching at University College London.
In 1922, he was invited by Masataro Sawayanagi, Kojiro Matsukata and went to Japan. In Japan, he became "Linguistic Adviser" to the Japanese Department of Education.
In 1923, he established the Institute for Research in English Teaching (IRET), now the Institute for Research in Language Teaching (IRLT), and became the first director
He founded the Institute"s Bulletin. In 1935, he was awarded Doctor of Literature by Tokyo Imperial University. In 1936, he returned to England and became consultant for Longmans, Green.
In 1937, he published Thousand-Word English with A. South. Hornby, the main creator of the first Advanced Learner"s Dictionary.
During World World War II he lived in England, and assisted the war effort with his language skills, publishing three booklets about the French language, to assist soldiers preparing for the invasion of Normandy. Auditory Observation
Oral Imitation
Catenizing
Semanticizing
Composition by Analogy
Composition by analogy is often referred to as the generative principle.
Palmer coined the term "ergon", defined as a phrase that serves as a syntactic prototype from which pupils can construct further sentences. "The learners" task is to acquire these ergons or "primary matter" as a database which will then serve them to generate many more analogous sentences - "secondary matter" according to Palmer.".