Communicative Approaches for Ancient Languages

Mair E. Lloyd, Steven Hunt, Mair E. Lloyd, Steven Hunt

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350157354
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Langues anciennes

This book is the first in its field. It showcases current and emerging communicative practices in the teaching and learning of ancient languages (Latin and Greek) across contemporary education in the US, the UK, South America and continental Europe. In all these parts of the globe, communicative approaches are increasingly being accepted as showing benefits for learners in school, university and college classrooms, as well as at specialist conferences which allow for total immersion in an ancient language. These approaches are characterised by interaction with others using the ancient language. They may include various means and modalities such as face-to-face conversations and written communication. The ultimate aim is to optimise the facility to read such languages with comprehension and engagement. The examples showcased in this volume provide readers with a vital survey of the most current issues in communicative language teaching, helping them to explore and consider adoption of a wider range of pedagogical practices, and encouraging them to develop tools to promote engagement and retention of a wider variety of students than currently find ancient languages accessible. Both new and experienced teachers and learners can build on the experiences and ideas in this volume to explore the value of these approaches in their own classrooms.

PART 1

INTRODUCING COMMUNICATIVE APPROACHES IN SCHOOL SETTINGS

CHAPTER 1

ACTIVE LATIN IN THE CLASSROOM: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Laura Manning

Teachers of classical languages find themselves at a pedagogical crossroads. Latin has been taught as a second language in an unbroken tradition for centuries. Yet now foreign language class enrolments at all levels in the US, including those of the Latin language, are falling at an alarming rate (Looney and Lusin 2018). This chapter presents a brief look at the state of twenty-first-century Latin teaching in the US, an overview of active methods of teaching Latin that were practised in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and a glimpse at how some of these same teaching methods are being adopted today in US schools, with a view to increasing enrolments and improving student engagement and motivation in Latin classes at the elementary, middle, high-school and college levels.

At the 2019 American Classical League Institute, an annual meeting during which classics teachers discuss issues related to teaching and learning classics, some teachers suggested to me in conversation that the cause of lower enrolments could be teaching practices, especially those that rely heavily on grammar rules being memorized and sentences being translated, with a focus on rarely seen vocabulary taken completely out of real-world context. Students learning Latin using these methods may rearrange English substitutes for the Latin words into an English-like word order in an attempt to understand the meaning of the sentences. This practice of rearranging words to ascertain meaning is met with mixed success, as students are often not quite sure whether they have met the mark. Students may not have the vocabulary or cultural experience to address the content of the sentences, especially when sentences are presented without enough context to assist the student. The result is a situation where students read out their English translations with a questioning lilt at the end of each declarative sentence. This unconscious change in pitch betrays the reality that the material has no clear meaning for the students until the teacher has verified the correct rendering. Students may believe that the meaning of a given Latin sentence is so obscure that only the teacher knows for sure what the sentence really means. That obscurity indicates a lack of emphasis on real communicative purpose for learning and using the language. Chilingaryan and Gorbatenko (2016) made a strong case for the relationship between student motivation and student success in language classrooms. Finocchiaro and Brumfit (1983) in Richards and Rodgers (2014) demonstrated that student motivation is one result of active, communicative approaches to language-learning. A return to that communicative emphasis in Latin classes will enhance student motivation.

Why have I characterized this as a return to communicative emphasis? Because when discussing traditions in Latin pedagogy, Latin teachers with whom I was speaking were often surprised to learn of the rich and successful history of active, communicative pedagogy in Latin classes 500 years ago. Tunberg (2012) described the essential role of active, communicative teaching and learning practices in reading, writing, listening and speaking in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This communicative emphasis in the classroom was a natural outgrowth of societal expectations. While Latin was not the mother tongue of any regional group of people during the Renaissance and afterwards, Latin was used for communicative purposes throughout European society, especially in schools and academic work in the sciences, government and the Church, where official communication regularly took place in the Latin language. Learning to communicate in Latin was useful in terms of preparation for careers and public life. In fact, the argument that Latin is useful surfaces again and again in primary and secondary education and in the academy even today, particularly in discussions about which courses have a place in the curriculum (Wringe 2016). If utility is accepted as a key reason for learning any subject, including Classics, why are we seeing falling enrolments in Modern Foreign Languages in today’s global-minded world?

And beyond utility, what good is an ability to read Latin? Two thousand years ago, the Roman orator Cicero famously upheld the value and importance of literature in his defence of his client, the poet Archias. Cicero defended the value of literature and the value of the poets and poetry to the nation, saying that poetry restores the spirit, is inspiring and is filled with morally worthwhile examples to which citizens should aspire. That same kind of defence of literature happened during the Renaissance. Marc Antoine Muret (1526–85), known as Marcus Antonius Muretus, a French humanist considered to be the foremost Latin stylist of his day, frequently presented powerful speeches on the defence of classical literature and its value in the school curriculum (Manning 2016). Learning Latin during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly for the educated classes, was more than being able to get by, even at a high level, in the language. The personal correspondence and public orations of speakers, including Erasmus and Thomas More, are filled with classical literary allusions, and this emphasis on Latin literature made its way into the curriculum (Tunberg 2012).

Educators today also offer reasons for keeping classical literature in the curriculum, and their reasons are as valid as those presented by Cicero and Muretus. That perception of the inherent value of original literature continues to have an impact on educational views and practices today. For example, students read Latin literature in courses and exams given under the International Baccalaureate programme (Hertberg-Davis and Callahan 2008; Callahan and Hertberg-Davis 2017). While Latin is clearly not the native spoken language of any people alive today, it is unique in that it has been a lingua franca for centuries with the result that a great deal of literature has been written in Latin and that Latin literature addresses the ideas of centuries of authors who grappled with human problems in engineering, civics, medicine, law, mathematics, moral philosophy and more. This abundance of literature offers students opportunities to engage in critical thought about innumerable ideas, and to consider the legacy of these ideas both for now and for the future. As students take their place as adults in the world and seek to improve the societies in which they live, some of the impact of classical culture takes place in the form of reaction against values and practices that are seen to have emanated from the ideas and customs such as slavery, racism and sexism discussed in classical literature (Cox 2018). A view of history that is sometimes painful, particularly when it discusses exploitation, violence, subjugation, and cruelty, can result in a backlash against Latin and Greek languages, literatures and cultures by students and by colleagues who teach in the discipline. Backlash or not, the essential role of literature in Latin classes must not be underestimated.

To think critically about the ideas presented in classical literature and about their consequences requires an ability to engage fully in the language and the cultural mindset in which they were originally written and formed. Such engagement requires that people learn to understand the language deeply. Engagement leads to increased motivation, as noted previously. But how has that teaching and learning been accomplished in past eras? The scope of this chapter allows only a very brief overview of the study’s historical context.

Dickey (2016) presented research on how Latin was taught as a foreign language in Rome, drawn from the study of ancient colloquia used as teaching texts in the second century BCE onwards. According to her, the students’ motivation for learning the Latin language in the eastern Roman empire, where Greek was the primary spoken language, included preparation for careers in the army and in law. By contrast, according to Dickey, people who lived in the western Roman empire learned Greek in order to understand Greek literature. Dickey’s textbook (2016) includes some of the colloquia that students in the eastern Roman empire used in their study of Latin, offering a glimpse into life in the classroom during this period. Students seem to have spent time learning the alphabet first, sometimes at the direction of older students, and then progressed to read and write syllables, words, phrases and longer passages, eventually working directly with the teacher.

By the sixth century BCE, the way students were taught had changed dramatically. The focus of education itself also shifted, so that ars grammatica, the study of grammar, took a central role. This led to the teaching of the trivium, which included dialectic (logical argumentation) and rhetoric (persuasive speaking), along with the study of grammatical elements. Soon, with the rise of the university in Europe in the eleventh century, dialectic had the most emphasis in education. During this time, Latin remained the primary language of education.

In my forthcoming doctoral dissertation, I asked how teaching and learning Latin is accomplished in today’s communicative classrooms. The context of this study is a review of pedagogical practices from the Renaissance, which included analysis of an oration by Johannes Posselius the Elder (1528–91), an educator whose Greek textbook was used throughout Europe for centuries. In 1589, Posselius set out his plan for educating students in an oration delivered at the University of Rostock. Modern language teachers recognize four communicative competencies: reading, writing, speaking and listening. Posselius addressed all of these, but emphasized the role of speaking both for teachers and for students. Posselius expected the students to speak Latin outside class too, and recommended that schools use spies to watch and report any lapses to the teacher. Students were forbidden to speak German or to speak Latin that was not Ciceronian in style,...