Language
So, particularly if you’ve come from a Greek/Latin/Classics background, most of what one is taught is how to do a lot of intensive reading. Intensive reading involves talking relatively small segments of texts and analysing, grammatically, each word and segment, mentally parsing and tagging things, and then
Language
I had an interesting (new) wayk experience over the weekend, and thought I would share it with you this week. Most of the time that I’m using WAYK it’s to try and communicate pieces of language to someone else. That is, I’m in the role of a
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One of my sidelines this year is to tutor an hour a week for students who are tutoring other students in introductory Greek. It always seems complicated to explain that. We are only in our second week, and in fact the student-tutors have not yet commenced their tutoring of
Language
Foreword: this is our last post for 2014. Enjoy your holidays and you'll hear again from the Patrologist in 2015. In this second of twin posts I’m exploring common ‘defeater’ reasons people give for sticking to GT as a method and rejecting approaches like Communicative Instruction. In
Language
In twin posts I’m going to explore some of the reasons people teach classical languages (by which I mean Ancient Greek, Latin, and similar languages that are mostly no-longer spoken and primarily of academic or historical interest) via the Grammar-Translation method (i.e. teaching grammar explicitly and
Language
A little while ago there was an exchange that started on B-Greek, a place I generally read but do not interact, about Exegesis. Then there were a few blog posts, one by D. Streett, one by B. Hofstetter. I often deliberately don’t engage in discussions that I don’
Language
Why bother doing anything but the best types of language acquisition activities? I’m a firm believer in Comprehensible Input, and fairly sold on Krashen et al., that CI is the key to language acquisition. I don’t quite buy Krashen’s “strong” version that nothing but CI is necessary,
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Q: Patrologist, why do you talk so endlessly about language acquisition? A: Because our field is so broken. In no other field do so many people who know their target language so poorly talk with such authority. I honestly wish it wasn’t necessary, that we rather lived in a
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1. Like most places, Classics and Biblical studies are dominated by teachers who didn't train in language teaching, know little about language acquisition, and never acquired an active ability in their chosen languages. 2. The population is comparatively small. 3. Modern language teaching in Australia does not have
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I've written on this topic a few times previously, on my former blog, notably here and here. Today I want to explore a different side of this question. I’ve previously suggested that to get to a level of ‘fluency’ in Ancient Greek or Latin, we might estimate
Language
Quite a few people were waiting to hear from Randall Buth in this series of interviews. Today I present Buth's answers to my interview questions! Thanks very much to Randall for taking the time to respond to this interview. You can read the earlier seven interviews here: Sebastian
Language
It's a common question, "Are you fluent?" or "How many languages are you fluent in?" But it's not a very helpful question, because 'fluency' is a very difficult to define concept. Many people have the idea that you 'learn