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I recently had occasion to complete a (modern) language placement test. The test was composed of 20 sections, each asking me to manipulate given sentences and change the forms to other ones (e.g. the equivalents of present to past, one structure to another, and so on). It wasn'
Language
Lately I've been reading, among other things, Joe Barcroft's Vocabulary in Languge Teaching, one of the e-modules in the Routledge E-Modules on Contemporary Language Teaching. And it's been helpful in thinking through some issues about vocabulary acquisition. Like many, I studied quite
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Disclaimer: The course you are enrolling in is a traditional language course. Almost nothing we do this semester will contribute to language acquisition. This course is focused on language as an artefact, and so we will be discussing grammar, analysing syntax, memorising morphology, rote-learning vocabulary associations with our L1,
Language
I've said in the past that it's just a bit wild to give beginning students translation as a task to do, because translation is a high-order skill, not a low-order one. In this post, I want to explore two different types of translation practice,
Greek
Right now I’m heading into week 11 of a 12 week semester teaching a Greek 1 class Koine. I’ve found it frustrating, mainly because I’m frustrated with myself. And as I reflect on that, I decided that if I’m given the opportunity to teach this again,
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The problem with an acquisition-based program in a seminary setting is time. A standard, seminary-type language course represents a 2-semester sequence in which students get drilled through a traditional grammar explanation of the language, with some practice on translating Greek passages to English, and are expected by
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I suspect a lot of people (though perhaps not the general demographic still reading my blog) will find this advice objectionable. There is a school of thought that hates students using Loebs. And, they have a point. If you think the goal of classical language learning is to (a) internalise
Greek
Below I have adapted (a lot is basically translated) a short story in Ancient Greek. It's very closely based off a post from Magister P, who runs an amazing blog from which I have learnt a lot of stuff. In particular, I've been quite taken by
Latin
Lately, I've been really getting into.... podcasts. Previosuly, I'd never quite had a good 'set-up' in my life to make listening to them useful, but that changed and now I'm on the bandwagon. I mostly, though, listen to target language podcasts
Language
Recently, I crunched some personal numbers. Using Italian Athenaze, a text I'm reading for CI purposes, I clocked myself reading about a page of text (approx 130 Greek words) at 50 secs a page, which calculated out at 156 wpm. That's pretty decent, I would say,
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Interviewer: So, your CV has a lot of Greek on it, but Bill Smith the Third here is our New Testament lecturer and will be covering that area. Me: ὦ, καλῶς. σὺ εἶ διδάσκακλος τῆς ἑλληινκῆς γλώσσης; Bill: Um, what did you say? Me: σὺ δύνῃ λαλεῖν ἑλληνιστί; ἐγώ σοι
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So, you’ve become convinced (probably by someone else) that communicative/comprehensible input based approaches to language acquisition are the way to go. But you still need to produce students who have an explicit, and often advanced, knowledge of grammar. That is, you want students to acquire language but you