Principles and Goals
There are two main goals to grammar-translation classes. One is to develop students’ reading ability to a level where they can read literature in the target language. The other is to develop students’ general mental discipline. As V. Mallison put it:
When once the Latin tongue had ceased to be a normal vehicle for communication, and was replaced as such by the vernacular languages, then it most speedily became a ‘mental gymnastic’, the supremely ‘dead’ language, a disciplined and systematic study of which was held to b indispensable as a basis for all forms of higher education.
The main principles on which the grammar translation method is based are the following:
- Translation interprets the words and phrases of the foreign languages in the best possible manner.
- The phraseology and the idioms of the target language can best be assimilated in the process of interpretation.
- The structures of the foreign languages are best learned when compared and contrast with those of first language.
Read more about this topic: Grammar Translation
Famous quotes containing the words principles and, principles and/or goals:
“Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“The machines that are first invented to perform any particular movement are always the most complex, and succeeding artists generally discover that, with fewer wheels, with fewer principles of motion, than had originally been employed, the same effects may be more easily produced. The first systems, in the same manner, are always the most complex.”
—Adam Smith (1723–1790)
“Artists have a double relationship towards nature: they are her master and her slave at the same time. They are her slave in so far as they must work with means of this world so as to be understood; her master in so far as they subject these means to their higher goals and make them subservient to them.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)