Ten years later, in 1878, he joined the Curso Superior de Letras as a professor, in the company of Guilherme de Vasconcelos Abreu, to assume the role of two new chairs, the first in modern linguistics to be taught in Portugal. Abreu, newly arrived from France and Germany, where he studied Sanskrit and Orientalism, held the position of chair of Sanskrit, Vedic and Classical Languages and Literatures, while Adolfo Coelho was assigned the chair of Comparative Philology, or science of language, created to satisfy a request from Portuguese academics and, as clear revelation of influences and alliances, of prominent linguists of the German school – Carolina Michaëlis, Adolf Tobler, Gustav Gröber, Karl von Reinhardstoettner, Wilhelm Storck – who not only proposed the chair but nominated Coelho: "Foreign science, the most competent to judge the methods created by it, recognises in Portuguese linguist Francisco Adolfo Coelho the necessary capacity to profess that discipline". (Manual de Filologia Portuguesa, Manual of Portuguese Philology, 1977, p. 22).

Indeed, in 1878 the list of Coelho's published work was vast, almost entirely composed of linguistic research, but also on folk literature and anthropology. The decision on his competence for the university teaching position was based on the content of these works.

However one could already catch a glimpse of another side of Coelho, which would more immediately bring him closer to his contemporaries: an educator, both theoretical and practical, and an advocate of the essential cause of education for the people. As an educator, he was equally interested in the three classic levels of education (primary, secondary and university), about which he wrote abundantly, on everything from reading methods for children and collections of games and children's stories, to studies on the educational role of handicrafts and physical exercise and even reports, programmes and projects aimed at reorganising the national education system. He was primarily interested, however, in combating the ignorance and backwardness of Portuguese society, which fuelled the ideological debate of his generation. Singled out as a ‘classroom’ linguist, one could never call his work in this field sedentary, when theoretical observation was clearly superseded by prolonged and intensive practical intervention: among the administrative positions he held, in 1883 he founded the Escola Primária Superior de Rodrigues Sampaio, which he ran almost until his death, and where he taught all subjects except for drawing, supposedly working five hours there every day. He was also a professor at Escola Normal Superior (a teaching college in Lisbon), alongside his post at the Curso Superior de Letras and, after 1911, at the Faculty of Letters of Lisbon.

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