When practicing new grammar, it is best to work with sentences that isolate that grammar with minimal distraction from, e.g., new vocabulary or other complicated grammar. Textbooks often do not adequately isolate the new grammar in their practice sentences, thus dividing the student’s attention. When our students complete a lesson, we want them to incorporate the new grammar in their larger repertoire of known grammar and practice it ‘in the wild.’ Exercise sentences composed on the principle of repetition with modification help them get there faster.
Put simply, “repetition with modification” means taking sentences the students already know and adapting them to shine a spotlight on the new grammar. Let’s look at how this strategy can be incorporated in practice.
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You’ve just taught your students a new grammatical concept, but they’re having trouble intuitively grasping how it functions. Let’s use the greatest construction of them all, the ablative absolute, as an example. We start with a sentence that uses only grammar they’re already familiar with:
Caesar haec dīxit et discessit.
Translate the sentence together, and make sure everyone is clear on the situation: Caesar said some stuff, then left. Now, write a new sentence that highlights the new grammatical concept, but keeps the exact same narrative arc:
hīs dictīs, Caesar discessit.
Caesar still said some stuff, and still left. We know this story. Now the students don’t have to spend any mental energy on figuring out the narrative, and can instead dedicate it all to figuring out the mechanics of the ablative absolute. In other words, 100% of the focus can be dedicated to unraveling and learning the new concept, because that is the only unfamiliar part of the sentence.
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Where this strategy shines is over longer periods of time. Take that single sentiment of Caesar saying some stuff. When we learn the perfect,
Caesar haec dīxit.
When we first learn indirect statement,
Caesarem haec dīxisse putō.
When we’re talking about the time-relationship between conjugated verbs and infinitives in indirect statement,
Caesarem haec dīxisse putāvī.
These don’t need to be long or involved. In fact, one of our goals should be getting students interacting with the new grammar as soon as possible, so shorter, simpler sentences are a better way to get them doing this quickly, especially if it’s happening mid-lecture.
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Repetition with modification is also a good way to proactively prepare students for reading authentic texts. In other words, instead of taking a simple, known quantity and increasing its complexity, as outlined above, you can start from the highest level of complexity – an unadapted ancient text – and simplify it until it features only grammar that your students are already familiar with. Have them read that! Then you can progressively undo the simplifications until the students have all the tools to read the original text.
Even when students are already capable of reading authentic texts, you can still use repetition with modification for reviewing grammar. If you are reviewing, say, conditionals, you can use simplified version of conditionals from text they’ve already read and from text they will soon read. This way, they’re either already familiar with the context and can focus on the grammar, or they will be better prepared to read the upcoming text because they’ve now been made familiar with the context.
At the macro level, entire textbooks can be, and in fact have been, built on this principle. Gareth Morgan’s Lexis, a textbook written by our own James Patterson, has students reading full, unadapted passages of Herodotus before the end of their first semester. The early chapters use solely sentences from Herodotus’ original text, modified to use only the grammar the students know and to highlight the grammar learned in the most recent lessons. These sentences get progressively more complex until the students are spending multiple consecutive class meetings doing nothing but reading unadapted Herodotus.
In summary, repetition with modification can be used, on the one hand, for quick practice exercises to clarify a new grammatical concept or, on the other, for something much more forward-looking, like easing the transition into reading authentic texts sooner than normal.
-James Patterson & David Welch
Classics Teaching 