Pregonero

The much maligned Grammar-translation method received its name from its opponents. It did not put any special emphasis on grammar, and, compared to the traditional schoolbooks had very little grammar in their courses. Actually, some of its proponents, like Ahn and Ollendorff in Germany, were accused of being ‘lightweight’, of not dealing with grammar in sufficient depth!  Ahn’s course, moreover, requires very little knowledge of grammatical terminology: singular, plural, masculine, feminine, etc. The proponents of the grammar-translation method basically reacted to a new class of learners, created by the industrial revolution, learners who could not be expected to learn languages by traditional methods. The initial motivation was reformist. The principal aim of grammar-translation was, ironically enough in view of what was to happen later, to make language learning easier. Therefore its proponents proceeded one step at a time, presenting a part of a grammatical paradigm (not the whole), with not too many words and lots of practice. Ahn’s  New, Practical and Easy Method (first published for French, then for German, English, Spanish, Italian and Russian), had 68 lessons in a space of only 66 pages, short, consecutively numbered sections. Each odd-numbered section contained a grammatical summary, about a dozen new words and sentences to translate into the mother-tongue. Dull, perhaps, but hardly the horror story we are sometimes asked to believe. Each even-numbered section contained sentences to translate into the foreign language.  The sentences had a double function: they afforded practice and exemplified grammar in a more concise and a clearer way than texts of reputable authors would do. Special sentences had to be designed to illustrate a grammar point. Such an approach, however, encourages the creation of extremely odd sentences or phrases, both syntactically and semantically, like the infamous the pen of my aunt. Pen is correct English, and so is of and so is my aunt, but the phrase as a whole, though grammatically correct, is at the same time unacceptable to a native speaker. The favourite example quoted by Sweet, one of the main later opponents of grammar-translation, was a sentence which actually occurred in a Greek class at school: The philosopher pulled the lower jaw of the hen. None of the words on its own is in any way esoteric, but the utterance  as a whole is surreal. (Howatt, A.P.R.: A History of English Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984: 131-45)