A History of communicative methods for Latin and Ancient Greek, easily missed
I have just been reading the amazing and intriguing doctoral dissertation by Francesco Felici, entitled "Now You’re Talking... Old Irish Towards a conversational approach to teaching Old Irish", and I want to share both the dissertation, and some related thoughts.
The thesis itself is fascinating because it documents the author's attempts to teach Old Irish via Communicative Methods (no one still has a good name for this, I think I have mostly settled on 'communicative' or 'communicative language teaching' CLT). But, because there is zero history of doing so, the entire chapter one of the dissertation is a survey of CLT approaches to Latin and Ancient Greek from the renaissance to the present.
That's why if you're a reader of this site, you should probably go and read chapter 1 of Felici's dissertation. Even though I knew lots of these texts, authors, practitioners, and methods, I have never seen such a systematic and thorough treatment of it all. He covers colloquia, Ollendorf, Adler, Kendrick, Rouse and his contemporaryies, Ørberg, the recent work of Cultura Clásica and Vivarium Novum, Polis, and a range of modern texts in Greek and Latin right up until the last couple of years. The dissertation was submitted in 2025, so that's about as recent as you can hope to find.
Felici clearly knows his stuff here, and I'm very grateful to see it pulled together in one place. In particular, there's lots of details and insights here that come from 'the European scene', that I have never really had access to. The bibliography is extensive, and a great starting point to go from his chapter to the broader work. I have written myself a bunch of notes of things to investigate further.
Personally, I had heard a little bit about Felici before, as I have a passing but never-got-anywhere interest in Old Irish. This is in part because all the standard textbooks are grim, foreboding traditionalist grammars and I don't have the patience for them anymore. Felici talks about his own work in trying to create a conversational-based textbook, but I am unaware that he has published anything along those lines beyond his Auraicept na nÉicsíne: A first reading book in Old Irish.
To read further in his thesis is to commiserate with the challenges. Every week I face those challenges in trying to teach Ancient Greek better, and write better resources. I think Latin has led the game, Ancient Greek is following slowly, like a tired runner looking forlornly at those far ahead, and Old Irish is just starting this race.
Felici's dissertation is open-access, so go and read chapter one for yourself!
p.s. Since originally writing this, I have been in contact with Dr. Felici himself, and am looking forward to some fruitful collaboration possibilities.
