[citation needed] In the early 16th century, Latin was the most widely studied foreign language because of its prominence in government, academia and business.
Throughout Europe in the 18th and the 19th centuries, the education system was formed primarily around a concept called faculty psychology.
It was believed that the intellect could eventually be sharpened enough to control the will and emotions by learning Greek and Roman classical literature and mathematics.
In the United States, the basic foundations of the method were used in most high school and college foreign language classrooms.
The mainstay of classroom materials for the grammar–translation method is textbooks, which, in the 19th century, attempted to codify the grammar of the target language into discrete rules that students were to learn and memorize.
A chapter in typical grammar–translation textbooks would begin with a bilingual vocabulary list and then grammatical rules for students to study and sentences for them to translate.
In commenting about writing letters or speaking he said he would be overcome with "a veritable forest of paragraphs, and an impenetrable thicket of grammatical rules".
There is no literature that offers a rationale or justification for it or that attempts to relate it to issues in linguistics, psychology, or educational theory.
Despite attempts at reform from Roger Ascham, Montaigne, Comenius and John Locke, no other methods then gained any significant popularity.
Later, theorists such as Viëtor, Passy, Berlitz, and Jespersen began to talk about what a new kind of foreign language instruction needed, shedding light on what the grammar–translation was missing.