From the turn of the nineteenth century until the late 1940s, the grammar-translation method ruled. In the few instances of attempted coups, it lost some ground, but academia always beckoned it back. Despite its antiquity, or because of it, the grammar-translation method is still alive and well in language classrooms throughout Europe, Asia, and even in the Americas. It is easy to teach; it requires no more than the ability to memorize lists of isolated vocabulary words; and it aims low in terms of oral communication and aural comprehension—no one teaching or learning a target language is required to speak, pronounce, or even understand the spoken language. Because the target language is taught in the students’ native language, it is possible for students to have studied it for years without having been required to participate in the most elementary conversation. Indeed, the only real challenge confronting students and teachers in the grammar-translation classroom is overcoming boredom.
A typical one-hour class might begin with ten minutes of synchronized verb declensions. This might be followed by the instructor’s explanation of a particular grammatical feature of the target language. The instructor might then assign students a series of fill-in-the-blank exercises or sentence constructions that demonstrate the grammar point. Other features of the grammar-translation class include translations of literary passages from the target language into the native language, identifying antonyms and synonyms, drilling vocabulary words, memorizing vocabulary lists, creating sentences with the new vocabulary words, and writing compositions in the target language. Except for the repetition drills, most of the above work is written.