The practice of language teaching has been so diverse that no single accurate description as to how languages are taught is agreed upon.Diverse as the teaching methods are，they basically go into two broad opposing groups by their attitudes towards the mother tongue，often termed traditionalist and modernist（Wilkins，1972）.The former covers methods such as Classical G-T and more recent Cognitive Methods that suggest that one's new knowledge is always based on the information one has already acquired.Therefore，one should take full advantage of his mother tongue in FLL；The classical method focuses on grammatical rule，memorization of vocabulary and grammatical forms and rules，translation of texts and transmission of linguistic knowledge through the mother tongue；In the 19th century，it came to be replaced bythe G-T Method；the latter includes as a myriad of designations like the Direct Method，the Audio-Lingual Method，the Audio-Visual Method，the Communicative Approach and so on which advocate that language is a set of habits and FL is a set of new habits independent of the mother tongue.As the new habits are unavoidably affected by old habits，they believe that most errors，if not all，in FL learning are caused by MTI.

The traditional view holds that grammar has been important and central to the teaching and learning of languages.Both the teachers and students have long used traditional grammars in their studies.Teachers learned to talk about language using grammatical terms.Concepts like subject and object，case and tense were all familiar to the teachers of foreign languages especially in Europe.As a result，students also became familiar with such terms because students were often taught languages through such grammatical concepts.Based on such linguistic view of languages，the G-T Method was created and practiced in language teaching.The two methods representing traditionalism are discussed in comparison with the modernism which will be discussed in chapter two.