a. THE GRAMMAR TRANSLATION METHOD
A historical sketch of the last hundred years of
language-teaching must be set in the context of a prevailing, customary
language-teaching “tradition.” For centuries, there were few if any theoretical
foundations of language learning upon which to base teaching methodology. In
the western world, “foreign” language learning in school was synonymous with
the learning of Latin or Greek. Latin, thought to promote intellectuality
through “mental gymnastics,” was until relatively recently held to be
indispensable to an adequate higher education. Latin was taught by means of
what has been called the Classical Method: focus on grammatical rules,
memorization of vocabulary and of various declensions and conjugations,
translations of texts, doing written exercises.
As other languages began to be taught in educational
institution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Classical Method
was adopted as the chief means for teaching foreign languages. Little thought
was given at the time to teaching someone how to speak the language; after all,
languages were not being taught primarily to learn oral/aural communication,
but to learn for the sake of being “scholarly or, in some instances, for
gaining a reading proficiency in a foreign language. Since there was little if
any theoretical research on second language acquisition in general or on the
acquisition of reading proficiency, foreign language were taught as any other
skill was taught.
In the nineteenth century The classical method came to be
known as the Grammar Translation Method. There was little to distinguish
Grammar Translation from what had gone on in foreign language classroom for
centuries beyond a focus on grammatical rules as the basic for translating from
the second to the native language. Remarkably, the Grammar Translation Method
withstood attempts at the turn of the twentieth century to “reform”
language-teaching methodology (see Gouin’s Series Method and the Direct Method,
below), and to this day it is practiced in too many educational contexts.
Prator and Celce-Murcia (1979:3) listed the major characteristics of Grammar
Translation:
