1. 2. A Historical Overview of Early Methods

A sense of history can provide teachers and teacher educators with a solid basis for critically evaluating the latest trends in a study of foreign language teaching.

The origins of foreign language teaching go back to the ancient Greeks, who were interested in learning about the mind and developing their will through learning another language. The Romans were probably the first to study a foreign language formally by studying Greek, learned from Greek tutors and slaves. Their approach was less philosophical and more practical than that of the Greeks.

In Europe before the 16th century, much of the language teaching involved teaching Latin to priests. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, French was a lingua franca for speaking to foreigners. Members of the court spoke French, of course, but it was also a necessary language for travelers, traders, and soldiers. French was fairly widely taught during this period, and a study of the theoretical books and language textbooks from this period indicate that many of the same questions that are being considered today by language teachers were being considered then.

The Grammar-Translation Method

The grammar-translation method was the dominant foreign language teaching method in Europe from the 1840s to the 1940s, and a version of it continues to be widely used in some parts of the world, even today.

The status of Latin changed during this period from a living language that learners needed to be able to read, write in, and speak, to a dead language which was studied as an intellectual exercise. Thus it was still acknowledged as an important language to learn for the purpose of gaining access to classical literature, and up until fairly recently, for the kinds of grammar training that led to the mental skills considered so important in any higher education study stream. The analysis of the grammar and rhetoric of Classical Latin became the model language teaching between the 17th and 19th centuries.

Emphasis was on learning grammar rules and vocabulary by rote, translations, and practice in writing sample sentences. The sentences that were translated or written by the students were examples of grammatical points and usually had little relationship to the real world. Latin has been studied for centuries, with the prime objectives of learning how to read classical Latin texts, understanding the fundamentals of grammar and translation, and gaining insights into some important foreign influences Latin has had on the development of other European languages Though some people tried to challenge this type of language education, it was difficult to overcome the attitude that Classical Latin (and to a lesser extent Greek) was the most ideal language and the way it was taught was the model for the way language should be taught. When modern languages were taught as part of the curriculum, beginning in the 18th century, they were generally taught using the same method as Latin. It is now more commonly known in Foreign Language Teaching circles as the Grammar Translation Method.

It is hard to decide which is more surprising - the fact that this method has survived right up until today (alongside a host of more modern and more "enlightened" methods), or the fact that what was essentially a method developed for the study of "dead" languages involving little or no spoken communication or listening comprehension is still used for the study of languages that are very much alive and require competence not only in terms of reading, writing and structure, but also speaking, listening and interactive communication.  How has such an archaic method, "remembered with distaste by thousands of school learners" (Richards and Rodgers, 1986:4) persevered?

It is worth looking at the objectives, features and typical techniques commonly associated with the Grammar Translation Method, in order to both understand how it works and why it has shown such tenacity as an acceptable (even recommended or respected) language teaching philosophy in many countries and institutions around the world.