Language Methods: History
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A Brief History of Teaching Ancient Greek and Latin (Draft)
James F. Patterson A teacher should know not just how a topic is taught but why the topic is taught that way. It is therefore worth learning a bit about the history of teaching Ancient Greek (hereafter simply Greek unless otherwise qualified) and Latin. A classics scholar should find this unsurprising. Arguments today about the…
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Comprehensible Input
My Anecdotal Observations about Comprehensible InputBy James F. Patterson I’ve read and heard a fair amount about Comprehensible Input (hereafter CI), at least for a college teacher, but I can’t say with confidence I know what CI really is, and I doubt much (if anything) I do in the classroom counts as CI. And I’m…
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Communicative Approach
The communicative method emphasizes four key elements of language-learning– reading, listening, speaking, and writing– and teaches these by encouraging students to focus on the successful transfer of meaning as opposed to the accurate reproduction of forms. The communicative method may be used to teach students either to learn to read or to communicate in Latin…
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Reading Approach
Reading approaches took off in the 1970s and 80s with the publication of a variety of different textbooks that undertook to teach Latin and Greek by introducing stories and short passages from the start. The basic idea underpinning this method is to get students reading accessible stories from the start and have them learn grammatical…
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Direct Method
This “direct” or “natural” method was developed c. 1900 as an alternative to the grammar-translation approach. It enjoyed considerable popularity until c. 1930, especially in U.K. public schools (the equivalent of US private schools). A well-known example of a textbook that employs this approach is Rouse’s Greek Boy. Starting in the 30s, the “direct” or…
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Grammar-Translation
The grammar-translation method is the most traditional of the various different approaches to classics pedagogy. Two well-known textbooks that employ the grammar-translation method are Hansen and Quinn’s Greek: An Intensive Course (1978) and Wheelock’s Latin (1956). In courses taught using this methodology, students learn grammar deductively and practice grammatical rules by doing drills and translating…
Classics Teaching 