Teaching Lingua Latina Part I:
The Intro
If you have not already read our Textbook Recommendation page, I suggest you head there first, especially if you have never used the Lingua Latina books before. If you are teaching yourself Latin, and you would simply like some tips on how to read Familia Romana well, check out our Five Tips post.
This series of posts is intended to address methods for making the best use of Familia Romana as a classroom teacher. The aim of this post in particular is to observe, first, the challenges of teaching languages in an school setting, and then in turn, of choosing Familia Romana as a classroom text for accomplishing your classroom goals.
The Challenges of Academic Languages
There is a strange conceptual dichotomy that plagues academic language education, and that is the distinction between conversational language and literary language. The common observer would likely not see much of a distinction here at all, only that the latter is a more elevated expression of the former, and that anyone who has a grasp of one could easily grasp the other, and, in a perfect world, they are, in fact, one and the same thing. However, because the journey from no experience, to a fluent speaker, to a fluent reader of eloquent literature is actually a process that demands many more hours and practice than a typical four-year school curriculum could accomplish, schools (in the United States anyway) have to make a choice between the two. They may either teach conversational language, a practice that though sluggish in its ascent to loftier expression, is geared towards providing much more frequent repetition of common constructions and vocabulary; or they may work to give the students grammar and vocabulary that is less often in the mouths of its native speakers, but is necessary for reading the great literature. In the scope of four years at school, any time spent practicing one is time lost in the other.
I am going to add to my parenthetical remark above about this choice being somewhat unique to the United States. Many schools in Europe, for example, that really value the acquisition of English, design their classes to be taught either partially or entirely in English. By doing so, they raise the stakes. You must learn English in order to pass all of your classes, not just your “English” class. This added pressure, along with a significantly greater amount of practice that one receives from spending an entire day in a foreign language instead of an hour, is what has made Europe a much more effective country at teaching languages, particularly English, than the United States, where nothing of the sort exists in mainstream education for even the modern languages, let alone the classical ones. In short, the conceptual dichotomy mentioned above is actually capable of being compressed into a single language learning challenge, but until we start making schools like the Europeans, the United States will continue to wrestle with this dilemma.
Schools presented with this choice between conversation and literacy are almost always going to elect the latter for a number of reasons, the first of which is that it looks better to parents, to the state, to whomever, if your students at least appear to be reading Don Quixote at the end of a four-year Spanish curriculum, de Tocqueville in French, Cicero in Latin, Homer in Greek, and this is not insignificant. The second and more compelling reason, if all pros and cons are weighed, and appearances aren’t a factor, is that it is probably better that students be introduced to the tools necessary for continuing their education after they graduate than for them to be given speaking skills which could more easily and more quickly be acquired in a non-academic environment.
This exact same choice is presented to the teacher of classical languages or the school that offers classical languages in its curriculum. You either present students with the tools for reaching the great literature, or you give them copious speaking, reading, and listening practice at a much lower level that will not allow them to reach the eloquence of Cicero but will give them a solid “feel” for the language and its most fundamental components. Again, deference is usually given to the former option for the reasons I laid out above.
The issue of choosing the best route is made even more complex by the fact that you are likely just one teacher in a series of teachers that your students will have. One teacher might prefer one path, while the next teacher in the line of succession would prefer the other. The two paths are not compatible at school, and so there usually must be made some reasonable compromise across the board.
The Two Potential Scenarios
I’ll try to paint a picture, as it were, of these two scenarios played out. The Latin teacher who has decided to take the conversational route for the last, say, four years, neglecting explicit grammar exercise and having done a good job maintaining a conversational enviornment, could be reasonbly certain that students would not only know about all of the forms of ‘sum’ but could reproduce them instantly and use them on their own as if it were second nature. Their grasp of indirect statements and basic subjunctive uses are more than just tenuous, having heard hundreds if not thousands of examples from a well spoken magister. Their vocabulary, though not extensive, is well-grounded in quotidian matters and they have a sense for the morphology of words they have not encountered before. Compare this to the student who, in lieu of conversation has spent the last four years learning Latin’s extensive grammar from first declension to gerundives to relative clauses in indirect speech. They possess no deep-rooted knowledge of any one of these things, but assiduous exercise has trained them to recognize certain forms and to piece together long-winded Ciceronian sentences or enigmatic Vergilian passages. Their recall of basic and even advanced morphology is present but nowhere near instantaneous. Frequent words with unusual forms, I am thinking particularly of words like ‘fero’ whose perfect tenses look nothing like its present-tense counterparts, are familiar but not obvious at each encounter.
Familia Romana: The Via Media?
There is a kind of in-between route, and this is the route down which the Lingua Latina series attempts to guide its reader, and that is the so-called “natural” route. The book provides copious text that slowly increases in complexity while also providing grammar instruction along the way. By all appearances, it addresses the cons of both options I brought up above. By the end of the book, a reader will have been introduced to all of the fundamentals and will have read a large amount of text for practice. However, by not fully committing to either of the original paths, as a stand-alone classroom text, it somewhat fails to provide on both fronts. It neither provides enough text for someone who is truly looking to learn in a “natural” way, and it does not provide enough grammar support for someone who is looking to bring their students to Ciceronian grammar in a few years’ time, despite the text being strong as a Latin language learning tool. So why would anyone consider this text for a classroom if it does not really help us accomplish either of the two potential goals we have for our students? Well, the answer to whether or not you should use this book in your classroom may potentially be “no” despite some serious advantages the book offers. If you have weighed the pros and cons and have decided that the high literature path is the better option, and it very well may be, there are frankly better books for the job. I am partial to the Henle Latin series myself, having used that book as a lad, and Ambulator, I am sure, would give his vote to the Wheelock.
It also could be the case that Lingua Latina is a good option, but not yet. At our school, students take two years of Latin before seeing Lingua Latina for the first time in eighth grade. The advantage to this approach is that students have been given some basic grammar tools first by which they can more easily interpret the text which, though easy to start, rapidly climbs beyond an eighth-grade student’s ability to read within ten of the thirty some chapters. This is basically the approach that I took when I was younger, and I feel that the whole thing has shaped up well for me, though I was and still am much more motivated to learn than your average group of sixth, seventh, or eighth graders. This grammar-first approach is clearly not the approach that Lingua Latina has in mind for its reader. It is not “natural” to learn the grammar first. The “natural” way would be the exact opposite. Whether or not this a better way is difficult to discern.
With all of this being said, though the book would likely not bring your average middle school student to a firm grasp of Latin on its own, it could work well in supporting a competent teacher’s pursuit of both high grammar and humble conversation by providing a decent amount of reading exercise to accompany instruction. In theory, this book is an indispensable resource for the classroom, but it takes a very energetic and knowledgeable teacher, who is willing to commit wholeheartedly to the “natural method”. Stay tuned for for the next post on practical tips for implementing it. I would love to have provided that information in one single tract, but the number of rewrites, rethinking, and edits have forced me to postpone until next week. Fortunately, I am now enjoying summer’s leisure, and, assuming nothing prevents me from doing so, I should have part the second up by this coming Saturday.
Please feel free to leave a comment to get a discussion moving. I am afraid that, despite my best efforts, I am never able to express myself as well as I ought to, but a prolonged dialogue below could help in unravelling the deceptively complicated knot of classical language education.
– Rogerius
Photo Credit – By Marie-Lan Nguyen (2011), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16667434
3 Responses
Thanks for the article. Why do you think that grammar books, such as Wheelock or Henle, lend themselves better to reading classical Latin, but Lingua Latina lends itself better to Spoken Latin?