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I not-infrequently talk about different types of encountering language with the following schema: Schoolroom Is when you're in a literal classroom with books, and you're learning 'about' foreign language, as something far, far removed from you, as this exotic and abstract 'other&
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This week in my meandering series, let me talk variously about other distance education environments I’ve experienced. I did the mainstay of my Latin studies as an external student at the University of New England (in Australia, not those other New Englands in other former colonies). A four year
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Well, semester 2 at various institutions here is under way, and I feel like some reflections upon distance education are in order. This might be part one of several... I might begin by talking about this semester. Last semester, regular sufferers of his blog will recall, I taught a small
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I’m sure I didn’t come up with this idea, and I know we’re not the first, but ever since emails started circulating prior to Rusticatio Australiana, a few of us discussed playing an RPG. In this post, I’m going to write a bit about that experience,
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Long-term sufferers of my blog know of my strong interest in Where Are Your Keys and all its applications. I knew that Evan had had a good deal of involvement with our American Latinist friends for a period, and was interested to see how this manifested at Rusticatio. Here’
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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'
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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,
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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
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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
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How much input can you get? I ran some numbers... Average conversation speed is, apparently 140-160 words a minute. We can understand speeech much faster, but we don't like to produce speech much faster. Let's be conservative though, and say that we are gettin 100