The G-T Method was devised and developed for use in secondary schools.It could even be called‘the grammar school method’since its strengths，weakness，and excesses reflected the requirements，aspirations，and ambitions of the nineteenthcentury grammar school in its various guises in different countries.It began in Germany，or more accurately，Prussia，at the end of the eighteenth century and established an almost impregnable position as the favored methodology of the Prussian Gymnasien after their expansion in the early years of the nineteenth century.

Coined by its opponents，the‘Grammar-Translation’label is misleading in some respects，it draws attention to two of the less significant features of the approach.The origins of the method do not lie in an attempt to teach languages by grammar and translation.The original motivation was reformist.The traditional scholastic approach among individual learners in the eighteenth century had been to acquire a reading knowledge of foreign languages by studying a grammar and applying this knowledge to the interpretation of texts with the use of a dictionary.Most of them were highly educated men and women who were trained in classical grammar and knew how to apply the familiar categories to new languages.However，scholastic methods of this kind were not well-suited to the capabilities of younger school pupils and，moreover，they were self-study methods which were inappropriate for group-teaching to adopt these traditions to the circumstances and requirements of schools.It preserved the basic framework of grammar and translation because these were already familiar both to teachers and pupils from their classical studies.Its principal objective was to make language learning easier.The central feature was the replacement of the traditional texts by exemplificatory sentences.It is perhaps appropriate to note here that the twentieth-century structuralist approach was also founded on the supremacy of the sentence and the two methodologies have much in common.