The evolution of foreign language teaching-learning processes has revolved around the specific needs of each historical period through which humanity has passed. These historical factors combined with social, political and scientific-technical ones have given way to the emergence, development and consolidation of different methods, approaches and techniques to achieve that the language learner reaches the proposed objective.
The methodology for the teaching of foreign languages in this same century was aimed at the development of productive skills; writing and translation. This situation is what the 20th century inherits and continues until the postwar period with the appearance of the formal programs of Fries (1947) and Lado (1964).
These programs, also called structural or grammatical, focus their attention on the systematic and rule-based nature of the language itself, giving preference to the phonological, grammatical, lexical and morphological aspects of it.
The linguistic correction was the fundamental thing and the production of oral and written texts presumed the development of listening and reading skills subordinated to those of writing and speaking.
Despite the predominance of grammatical aspects, new terms are beginning to be used when it comes to teaching languages, including foreign languages.
Hence, English has become the international and instrumental language par excellence, indispensable in the communication of the postmodern world. This reality, according to Irizar (1996) also explains that it is in the teaching of English that the greatest advances have been made and a proliferation of teaching methods, approaches and texts ranging from what is known as the first manual designed to the teaching of English or The English Scholemaster in 1580 until the Spectrum in 1982 which is used 400 years later and is defined as a communicative English course.
Despite the rise of methods that prohibited the use of translation, this technique still remains implicit in current educational practices and deserves to be equated with the ability to solve problems that underlies the main statements established in teaching-learning theories. That is why, demonstrating the usefulness of translation as a problem-solving strategy for learning English, through a retrospective, introspective and prospective analysis, constituted the primary objective of this small investigation with a reflection on the use of the didactics in the area of Instrumental English.