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A while ago, I responded to common misconceptions, held by many in the classical education world, about active/immersive/natural/comprehensible input-based/communicative methods1 of teaching Latin. Andrew Ellison, friend, colleague, and fellow Latin lover, responded with many important points that I would like to reinforce, and a few that I fear might lead to further misconceptions that I would like to address here, especially the ideas surrounding his metaphor that “lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”
One of the most important points his article brought up is that classical school administrators often don’t sufficiently understand the nature of language acquisition and the purpose of Latin. Ellison discusses this further in a Cana Academy article, in which he also points out the prevalent problem of not devoting sufficient time to the study of Latin.
This, to me, seems to be the elephant in the room of classical education: If we believe that classical language study is central to classical education, as indeed it is, then schools need to be willing to make sufficient time for it. True language acquisition, such as was expected for over a millennium after the fall of Rome, requires ample time, that is, regular, ideally daily, practice. No one would sign up their kids for piano lessons and expect them to make significant progress by practicing only twice a week.
Classical schools up until the early 1900s devoted many hours to language learning (usually not just one language but several). “As languages were a basic art of education until well into the nineteenth century, the stock and ideas and procedures educated men carried with them was largely derived from the study of foreign languages and literatures, with a preponderance […] of concepts drawn from the classics.” (Kelly x). Thus, a British school in 1768 had a total of six hours of language classes (French, Latin, and Greek) every day, with Latin starting in second grade: “The School begins at Seven in which languages are taught ‘till Nine. […] From One till Four languages are taught.” (p. 6) In 1867, the fifth and sixth graders of a Latin School in Germany had ten weekly hours of Latin, four of French, and only three in their native German. Seventh and eighth graders had nine weekly hours of Latin, five of Greek, four of French, and two of German.
Related to the problem of time is that of misunderstanding the telos of Latin. Many classical school administrators still regurgitate the utilitarian, wholly unclassical idea that the main purpose of Latin is to improve students’ English grammar and vocabulary. In the classical tradition, Latin was never learned with a goal of improving students’ English; the goal was filling students’ minds with “the stock and ideas and procedures educated men carried with them” and thus to enable students to not only read and fully understand what they read, but also to produce poems and speeches of their own and deliver them eloquently, in other words, to become full participants in the Great Conversation. It is time for the classical education movement to put aside utilitarian, progressive views of the role of Latin and start embracing a truly classical understanding of language. And while I’m certainly not arguing that schools need to go back to having Latin two hours a day (nor to starting the school day at 7am!), we might ask to what extent a school is truly classical that doesn’t emphasize full language acquisition and isn’t willing to make the time required for such acquisition.
Another important point Ellison raises is that students must be engaged in all four modalities of the language arts, i.e. listening, speaking, reading, and writing, and that it is not enough to just have them read, even if they do so extensively. He is also right in suggesting that sometimes comprehensible input-based classes run the risk of spending way too much time on Simon says and other simple activities or silly texts. All too often, the myth that all you need to do is listen and read is perpetuated (Brown and Larson 36-56). Teachers in the classical tradition understood that frequent, steady and active production of the language “begets ready, spontaneous, automatic and unconscious facility in using the words of the new language with complete ease” (Fr. Ganss 211). Grammatical competence and oral fluency mutually reinforce each other. There is really no reason why we couldn’t have both an input-rich classroom and teach grammar explicitly and thoroughly.
However, some of the points in Ellison’s article could easily lead to further misunderstandings. For example, the claim that 35 years ago there was only one method, and the emphasis throughout that the communicative method is a “fringe phenomenon,” a “revolutionary movement,” and a “new trend” might lead some to believe that this method is really brand new and not the classical way to teach Latin. This is misleading. My colleague Dr. Erik Ellis and I have recently written about the Art of Grammar in the Trivium in hopes of showing that the usual narrow approach to grammar isn’t historically accurate. Books such as Leonhard’s Latin: Story of a World Language or Kelly’s 25 Centuries of Language Teaching demonstrate that Latin was widely used actively and communicatively up until around the 1800s. Moreover, oral teaching and extensive reading of Latin never died out, and even though Wheelock has been one of the mainstream books, Latin teachers never had a “limited range” of available textbooks at their disposal. Here is a non-exhaustive list of books from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s published in England or the US, all of which emphasize comprehensible input through extensive reading and teach grammar in context rather than as isolated, uncontextualized drills:
The Latin Speaker: Early Dialogues and other selections for Memorizing and Declaiming, by Frank Sewall (1878)
Fabulae Faciles: A First Latin Reader (1884; republished as Ritchie’s Fabulae Faciles: A First Latin Reader by Kirtland, 1903)
Beginner’s Latin Book, by William Coe Collar (1888)
How to Speak Latin: A Series of Latin Dialogues with English Translation, by Stephen W. Wilby (1896)
Via Latina; An Easy Latin Reader, by W. C. Collar (1897) (“designed for rapid reading, not analysis and parsing”)
Second Latin Book, by Frank Millder and Charles Beeson, (1900, 1902).
Scalae Primae: A First Latin Reader, by J. G. Spencer, London, 1908
Roman life reader, illustrating Roman character, manners, history, and society, for fifth forms, by S.E. Winbolt (1910)
Latin for Beginners, by Benjamin D’Ooge (1911).
Decem Fabulae Pueris Puellisque Agendae, by Paine & Mainwaring & Ryle, 1912)
The Writing of Narrative Latin, by Benjamin Wiestling Mitchell (1915)
A Junior Latin Reader, by Frederick Warren Sandford and Harry Fletcher Scott. (1919, 1922, 1923)
First Latin Lessons, by Harry Fletcher Scott (1922)
Legends of Gods and Heroes: A first Latin Reader, by T.S. Morton (1926). [This is part of a series “Elementary Latin Classics” which includes Julia; Camilla, Legends of Ancient Rome, edited by Wilkinson; The Seven Kings of Rome, edited by Nall; Ora Maritima, by Sonnenschein.]
Latin for Today: First Year Course (1927ff.); Latin for Today: Second Year Course (1928) by Mason Gray and Thornton Jenkins.
Narrationes Biblicae from the Vulgate, by Harry E Wedeck and Abram Lipsky (1928)
Living with the Romans, by Irene J Crabb (1949; 1951, 1955)
Lingua latina secundum naturae rationem explicata, by Hans Henning Ørberg (1955; later republished as Lingua Latina per se illustrata)
Latin by the Natural Method: First Year [also Second Year, Third Year], by Fr. Most (1957)
Lingua Latina: Liber Primus & Lingua Latina: Liber Alter, by Mary Ann T. Burns, Carl J. Medicus, Richar Sherburne (1964; 1865).
Our Latin Heritage, by Lillian M. Hines (1966, 4 volumes)
Many of these textbooks stress the importance of active production of the language in their introductions. W. H. Rouse, for example, emphasizes in his foreword to Decem Fabulae: “What we know of Latin is what we have in our memory and ready for instant use, not what we can puzzle out with a grammar and a dictionary; the physical reaction helps us to learn, to remember, and to use.” The Junior Latin Reader’s foreword emphasizes: “Children demand early introduction to connected discourse, which is the purpose of language” and the preface to Legends of Gods and Heroes explains: “Experience has shown that boys and girls grow weary if kept at mere grammar for any length of time. The ‘sad mechanic exercise’ and the monotonous inconsequence of those long arrays of detached sentences soon dull the keenest spirits and cause progress to be slow and disappointing.” The first-year textbook Narrationes Biblicae aims “to give the pupil power to read Latin as Latin.” And Fr. Ganss, in his foreword to Fr. Most’s series Latin by the Natural Method, describes these books as a continuation of the methods used in 1250-1550 which “lead the student to reproduce the natural process of habit formation by which Roman children learned Latin as their mother tongue.”
Another point that I believe requires some clarification or modification is the statement that a teacher who wishes to use communicative methods in the classroom needs to have “nearly flawless” oral Latin from the outset. This advice will likely discourage most teachers and leave them stuck in never-ending grammar drill purgatory with no way out.
We seem to be at a point in the classical education movement when the demand for Latin teachers far outnumbers the supply (perhaps the overemphasis on grammar drills hasn’t produced enough people enthusiastic about teaching Latin to the next generation?). Many schools therefore hire teachers with minimal background in Latin. And many parents who homeschool their children classically wish to teach their children Latin, despite the lack of Latin in their own education. Should we really tell all teachers and homeschoolers that if they can’t speak Latin fluently, they should just stick to grammar chants? Moreover, lack of knowledge of Latin is just as much a problem for someone attempting a more communicative classroom (or homeschool) as it is for someone teaching a grammar centered one. A teacher I recently met, who had taught grammar-centered first year Latin for three years, didn’t seem to realize that “memoriae” in phrase repetitio est mater memoriae is not the nominative but the genitive form. Why are we holding communicative teachers to higher standards than grammar-focused ones? If Chesterton is right that “A thing worth doing is worth doing badly,” that should go for both.
Of course, teachers wishing to use Latin communicatively, especially in the upper school, should endeavor to become “pretty dang good” and always be mindful of Barbarisms at the Gate. But instead of telling people they shouldn’t even try until they are perfect, a more fruitful approach might be to encourage or even urge teachers to continually strive to improve their Latin, taking baby steps toward more progress each year. Opportunities for willing teachers abound: there are countless Bidua (Latin immersion weekends) and Rusticationes (typically Latin immersion weeks) all over the country (and beyond!), in the summers and throughout the year, not to mention teacher training courses or programs, ranging from individual courses one could take with the Ancient Language Institute, The Paideia Institute, Veterum Sapientia Institute, Polis – The Jerusalem Institute of Languages and Humanities or as part of the University of Dallas’ online Master or Certificate in Classical Education, to the Lexington U Graduate Certificate in Latin Studies or Boston University Master of Arts in Teaching Latin and Classical Humanities program. On a smaller scale but still highly effective, a subscription to the Legentibus App will allow teachers to increase their own input, listening comprehension, pronunciation skills, and ability to think in Latin.
And classroom teachers with multiple sections are in a particularly good position to improve their oral Latin, because the best way to learn something is to teach it. Docendo discimus. Scripting out a picture study, or a series of circling questions for a reading (or using the scripts from Latin through Stories) and delivering this in a series of classes will lead to great gains in proficiency over time. In fact, second language acquisition research has shown that repeatedly doing the same oral task leads not just to greater fluency but also greater accuracy over time, since the repetition frees up mental space for the speaker to think about correct forms and to self-correct (Brown and Larson 55-57). And indeed, I’ve seen teachers that I met at a Biduum make drastic progress from one year to the next, far surpassing my own progress in that time, because of their 5 days a week, 5 hour daily immersion through their teaching. They didn’t start out with flawless oral Latin, but they became “pretty dang good” in a relatively short time, simply by exemplifying the lifelong learner ideal of the classical teacher. And what language teacher wouldn’t want to work hard on improving their own language skills?
And in the meantime, while on the road to fluency but not yet really fluent, teachers can also be consoled by knowing that full 100% immersion isn’t necessary. It’s not “aut Latine aut nihil” (Keeline). We can achieve an input-rich (and grammar-rich) classroom by using resources that provide large amounts of high-quality input which makes it okay for teachers to not speak Latin exclusively in class.
Lastly, I would like to address the important point that one of the greatest imperatives of a language teacher is to “do no harm.” While I wholeheartedly agree with this statement, I probably have a broader definition of harm in mind, perhaps due to working more with lower-school teachers while Mr. Ellison might have primarily had high school teachers in mind. In my view, one of the greatest harms a lower-school Latin teacher can inflict on their students is when students already hate Latin by the time they enter middle school. Starting middle school with a negative view of Latin often ruins a student’s language experience for the rest of their upper school Latin.
But a related claim seems to be that a grammar-focused approach, even if done poorly, is harm-free or at least neutral, because it results in “at least some” knowledge, while the “Natural Method,” if not employed correctly, can be harmful because it “results in no knowledge.” The statement that “[a] couple of classes of didactic, explanatory instruction can easily result in some immediately assessable individual fragments of knowledge; two periods of even excellent immersion Latin will not do the same” is both accurate and problematic. They definitely will result in vastly different kinds of knowledge. “Didactic, explanatory instruction” likely does result in “some immediately assessable individual fragments of knowledge” but not necessarily in lasting acquisition. But why would a classical school prioritize “immediately assessable knowledge” over long-term acquisition? Is assessment our end? “Two periods of excellent immersion Latin” will indeed not do the same, but they will lay the foundation for lasting acquisition.
But more importantly, I am really not convinced that grammar-focused instruction automatically produces true knowledge. A student’s ability to fill out a conjugation or declension chart proves their ability to fill out a chart, but doesn’t prove their understanding of the concept nor any kind of lasting knowledge. It may be true that “a modest thing done well is better than the best thing bungled,” and I would be fully reconciled with the grammar-heavy approach if it were, but way too often, in our classical schools today, the “modest thing” is not actually well done. I get a decent number of previous Latin students in my introductory German classes at the University of Dallas. Over the years, I have by and large not found that the vast majority of them have a significant advantage in terms of their grammatical understanding over students who haven’t had Latin. One student came to me because he struggled with the dative, and when I expressed surprise about that, since I knew he’d had eight years of Latin, he responded that all they did was recite the same charts and rules year after year. Another student visited me early on in the semester because she was utterly confused about verb conjugations. It turned out she had three years of Latin and could perfectly recite “o-s-t-mus-tis-nt.” But she didn’t understand what a conjugated verb really means. Thus, she was convinced that verb conjugation in German is entirely different from Latin because to her, verbs were just sounds in a chant or letters in a chart, not ways to create meaning in sentences, so she couldn’t see that a third person singular verb in Latin does the same thing as a German one. If three years of Latin leave a student without an understanding of the most basic elements of grammar, what was the point?2
I’ve also experienced this firsthand with my own children who have been in a grammar-heavy Latin program. To my utter disappointment, I can’t say they have come away with a stronger understanding of grammar. They still don’t really know what the cases mean, or what a participle is, even though they’ve spent oodles of time memorizing the definitions and the rules of the formation. But they didn’t encounter and use participles nearly enough to truly understand how they work in a sentence. I’m all for thorough and explicit teaching of grammar, but it’s time to recognize that what’s currently happening in many classical schools isn’t working for a great number of students. The reality of many grammar-focused classrooms seems to be that they lose the forest for the trees by focusing on years and years of charts in isolation without allowing students to truly encounter the language. Knowledge that doesn’t have a hook typically doesn’t last. Not much is gained if students have far too few opportunities to see the forms and rules in a real text for them to become meaningful, especially when most students can drop Latin before they will even really be applying all that theoretical, potential knowledge. Andrew Olympi describes his “turning point” in the way he thought about his grammar-centered instruction:
The turning point came when a former student visited me and proudly proclaimed he still remembered his Latin. When I prodded him for a demonstration, he gleefully recited: “amo, amas, amant, uh . . . amamus?” And that was all. I had an epiphany: What was it worth? All those hours of drilling and scribbling, and reciting and translating and testing. And this was a good student.
But Mr. Ellison is absolutely right in emphasizing that most Latin teachers today don’t feel adequately prepared to do anything other than teach the way they were taught. I hope the time will come when classical schools will realize the importance of more training and support for their language teachers and be willing to pay for a weeklong rusticatio or teacher training course in the summer or a subscription to Legentibus. But even without a budget, teachers could have a Latin reading group in which they practice asking questions about the text and paraphrasing in Latin with each other, as well as seminar discussions of Latin pedagogy articles. This might be even more productive if done with other schools in a network to foster collaboration and sharing of resources. Instead of discouraging teachers from trying something new or criticizing those who try for their mistakes, let’s focus on helping each other improve our language and our teaching skills. Why settle for weeds when we could have lilies that flower and thrive?
Dr. Laura Eidt teaches in the German, Spanish, Comparative Literature, Humanities and Classical Education programs at the University of Dallas, and is Director of the Humanities Program and of UD’s K-5 Latin curriculum Latin Through Stories. She grew up in Germany and received her B.A. in English, Spanish, and German Literatures and Linguistics from Hamburg University. After a year-long scholarship to study at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid, she decided to pursue a career in Comparative Literature at the University of Texas in Austin. She wrote her M.A. thesis entitled Poetry of German Expressionism and the Spanish Avant-garde: Re-Contextualizing García Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York and her doctoral dissertation, Writing and Filming the Painting: Ekphrasis in Literature and Film, which was also published as a book. Having studied English, Spanish, French, Italian and Latin (in addition to her native German) at various points in her life, she is also highly interested in how languages are learned, how they are related, and in effective ways of teaching foreign languages. This interest has led her to develop various classes on foreign language pedagogy, as well as the K-5 Latin curriculum for UD’s St. Ambrose Center.
References:
Brown, Steven and Jennifer Larson, “Myth 3: You can acquire a language simply through listening or reading” in Second Language Acquisition Myths: Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching (University of Michigan Press, 2012), pp. 36-56.
Ganss, George, St. Ignatius’ Idea of a Jesuit University (Marquette UP, 1956).
Keeline, Tom, “Aut Latine aut nihil”? A middle way” The Classical Outlook, Vol. 94, No. 2 (2019), pp. 57-65.
It may be helpful to clarify these terms (all of which are admittedly somewhat problematic) along with my rationale for using “communicative methods” as an umbrella term in the remainder of this article.
“Active Latin” focuses on output, as opposed to input (see below), and emphasizes producing the language actively in speaking and writing. The term is a bit unfortunate since it appears to imply that other ways of teaching Latin are passive. But it may be helpful in distinguishing production-oriented approaches from solely input-focused ones.
“Immersive” suggests full, 100% use of Latin with never a word of English. This is daunting and unrealistic for most teachers (and not entirely necessary: the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages recommends 90%).
The “Natural Method” is strictly speaking an approach associated with Terrell and Krashen in the 1970s and 80s (they coauthored The Natural Approach in 1983), but it is also often applied to the “Direct Method” which became popular in the early 1900s. Both emphasize directly establishing immediate audiovisual associations between words, phrases, and ideas; however the direct method often included explicit instruction in grammar, while many proponents of the natural method do not.
“Comprehensible Input” (CI) means providing messages (ideas, stories, questions) that students can understand, so they can make form-meaning connections and build a linguistic system in their minds. Strictly speaking, it is not a method but an underlying theory of language acquisition.
“Communicative Methods” is an umbrella term that comprises a variety of (rather heterogeneous) methods and approaches to language learning that focus on providing opportunities for students to hear, read, speak and write the language with communication of meaning in the foreground. I will be using this term here since it is the broadest and thus best captures the variety of approaches, but please note that my use of “communicative” does not refer to everyday language uses such as ordering cappuccino. I am using the term “communicative” to describe methods in which the communication of content, of meaningful messages in Latin, is in the foreground.
Of course equally mind-boggling is the opposite and appallingly frequent phenomenon of students who take four years of a Modern Language and can’t conjugate a single verb (and in some cases, can’t even identify one in a sentence).