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This was another posting to Latinteach this week:
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For extensive reading, there's nothing like handing a level 2 student Oerberg's Lingua Latina. It starts so easy that you can get students to work on TRULY reading in WORD ORDER. In an ideal world, (maybe when I do pre-AP?) I would love to assign a chapter from that a weekend, and require Latin summaries for homework.
We have this idea that the only way to access Latin/to demonstrate that we understand Latin is by presenting a good translation. That just isn't the case.
I am constantly amazed by how much I can appreciate what I call a "fully loaded" Latin sentence--abl absolutes, phrases, clauses--and totally understand the meaning and WHY the words are in the order they are, phrased the way they are, etc.--AND YET, if I were to try to translate the same sentence into English it would be clumsy or if nothing else wordy.
Very few professors it seems (no offense!) offer any other way to access the language except through providing translations, often focusing on the importance of an eloquent translation. Jeanne at Davidson College actually asks students to explain the Latin in the Latin! And she always assigns more than a person could actually sit down and translate, but not more than a person could READ.
I am also puzzled how we go from the Cambridge Latin Course, with its ever lengthening stories to AP where was suddenly go back to just a dozen lines at a go. And with that said, I do know it is critical once you are in AP to make sure students have truly mastered their morphology and perhaps there is that feeling that one must demand exact precision, which can mean slowing down. But there must be a happy medium.
And I think it is extensive reading. I think it is the importance of demonstrating to students at some point before AP that they can read in word order, that it is pleasurable to READ Latin, even if it is easier Latin, that it is POSSIBLE to read Latin without knowing every single darn word on the page and to get meaning and pleasure from it, etc.
And then, when we return to reading the more serious or difficult material at the current level of learning, we must also remember NOT to just focus on a portion at a time.
Last year, when I had a student reading Ovid in independent study, every time we had a chance to go over the reading together, I would read the Latin outloud from the beginning of the story until the place we were working on. It is AMAZING how that simple act of rereading and reviewing will suddenly make vocabulary items jump out at you--words that are thematically related or simply repeated.
AP students would be greatly served by being trained--well in advance of AP--the importance of reading and rereading the text as a text, and not a set of lines to be decoded and then memorized if possible. Students shouldn't be studying for tests by reviewing all the translations they've written, but by rereading the Latin--seeing the words, seeing the phrasing, etc.
***
Now, with all that said, am I doing extensive reading with my students?? No. Have I ever done? Yes. I tried an experiement one year with my 8th graders back at Porter. It went ok. I had reading logs for them, which they had to fill out and record whether they had done any prereading, etc, and then wrote a summary. Of course, it benefitted the A students but many others didn't do it.
So, I guess the question is, HOW do you get students to do this, HOW do you have accountability WITHOUT creating more work for you???
I'm thinking that if I have a pre-AP level 3 Latin class year after next that extensive reading will be one of the requirements--for over the weekend. I'll get a set of Lingua Latina, start easy, etc, and have summaries written in Latin due on Mondays. Then students can trade summaries and read them.
It may well be possible with the Latin 1's I have now, since I do have them writing stories in Latin every now and then. In fact, I have stories to post, I just haven't had a chance to post them yet.
Who knows? Maybe I will one day have all my great ideas put into action. One can dream....
***
For extensive reading, there's nothing like handing a level 2 student Oerberg's Lingua Latina. It starts so easy that you can get students to work on TRULY reading in WORD ORDER. In an ideal world, (maybe when I do pre-AP?) I would love to assign a chapter from that a weekend, and require Latin summaries for homework.
We have this idea that the only way to access Latin/to demonstrate that we understand Latin is by presenting a good translation. That just isn't the case.
I am constantly amazed by how much I can appreciate what I call a "fully loaded" Latin sentence--abl absolutes, phrases, clauses--and totally understand the meaning and WHY the words are in the order they are, phrased the way they are, etc.--AND YET, if I were to try to translate the same sentence into English it would be clumsy or if nothing else wordy.
Very few professors it seems (no offense!) offer any other way to access the language except through providing translations, often focusing on the importance of an eloquent translation. Jeanne at Davidson College actually asks students to explain the Latin in the Latin! And she always assigns more than a person could actually sit down and translate, but not more than a person could READ.
I am also puzzled how we go from the Cambridge Latin Course, with its ever lengthening stories to AP where was suddenly go back to just a dozen lines at a go. And with that said, I do know it is critical once you are in AP to make sure students have truly mastered their morphology and perhaps there is that feeling that one must demand exact precision, which can mean slowing down. But there must be a happy medium.
And I think it is extensive reading. I think it is the importance of demonstrating to students at some point before AP that they can read in word order, that it is pleasurable to READ Latin, even if it is easier Latin, that it is POSSIBLE to read Latin without knowing every single darn word on the page and to get meaning and pleasure from it, etc.
And then, when we return to reading the more serious or difficult material at the current level of learning, we must also remember NOT to just focus on a portion at a time.
Last year, when I had a student reading Ovid in independent study, every time we had a chance to go over the reading together, I would read the Latin outloud from the beginning of the story until the place we were working on. It is AMAZING how that simple act of rereading and reviewing will suddenly make vocabulary items jump out at you--words that are thematically related or simply repeated.
AP students would be greatly served by being trained--well in advance of AP--the importance of reading and rereading the text as a text, and not a set of lines to be decoded and then memorized if possible. Students shouldn't be studying for tests by reviewing all the translations they've written, but by rereading the Latin--seeing the words, seeing the phrasing, etc.
***
Now, with all that said, am I doing extensive reading with my students?? No. Have I ever done? Yes. I tried an experiement one year with my 8th graders back at Porter. It went ok. I had reading logs for them, which they had to fill out and record whether they had done any prereading, etc, and then wrote a summary. Of course, it benefitted the A students but many others didn't do it.
So, I guess the question is, HOW do you get students to do this, HOW do you have accountability WITHOUT creating more work for you???
I'm thinking that if I have a pre-AP level 3 Latin class year after next that extensive reading will be one of the requirements--for over the weekend. I'll get a set of Lingua Latina, start easy, etc, and have summaries written in Latin due on Mondays. Then students can trade summaries and read them.
It may well be possible with the Latin 1's I have now, since I do have them writing stories in Latin every now and then. In fact, I have stories to post, I just haven't had a chance to post them yet.
Who knows? Maybe I will one day have all my great ideas put into action. One can dream....
