To Parse or Not to Parse? Strugglers in group reading

[ginlindzey]

This was in response to a note on Latinteach.  A teacher was discussing what to do when group translating (grammar/translation class set-up) and a kid totally botches a sentence creating a real howler and such.  Most people were suggesting some form of parsing.  this is what I suggested.

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This thread has interested me, in great measure because I don't think the heart of the problem has been identified. (Then again, I haven't had much sleep in weeks so who knows what I'm rambling on about.)

I've taught middle school (inner city) and at that time read a lot about teaching this age group.

I hope everyone here is familiar with Bloom's Taxonomy. Some of you may hate it because it's been shoved down your throat, but it really does help to understand where are students go wrong.

Memorizing declension and conjugation endings is just simple rote memory. It is a low-level skill. Just simple knowledge. Simple recall. However, when we are translating, we are using high level skills of synthesis and analysis. So we may have a student who can decline a noun just fine, or go from singular to plural, nominative to accusative, but can't make a thing out of an actual sentence of Latin. I have heard Latin teachers say to students that, gosh, if they know their endings they *should* be able to figure out the sentence. Just *apply* the endings.

But it's not that simple. The brain at that age does not function at those higher levels naturally. Physical and mental development varies from person to person at that age, and thus is a tricky age to teach. Anyone who has taught Latin 1 to seniors knows that they grasp details and how things go together far more quickly than freshmen.

Parsing, sure, can be done, but I find that it interferes with the flow of reading. I try to teach my students some different techniques to build reading skills.

My most used item in my bag of tricks is metaphrasing. A basic metaphrasing place-holding sentence is "someone verbed something to someone." Of course, sentences will vary and this doesn't cover genitives, for instance, or prepositional phrases, but it does provide a good place to start and allows one to analyze the sentence as it develops without resorting to "hunt the verb."

Since you teach from LFA, let me grab a copy and pull a random sentence from it to apply. Ok. How about this:

p 112. Graeci et Troiani ad Troiam pugnaverunt.

So, I would treat this sentence this way if we were metaphrasing the whole sentence.

Graeci: The Greeks verbed something.
Graeci et: The Greeks and someone (parallel construction) verbsed something.
Graeci et Troiani: The Greeks and Trojans verbed something.
Graeci et Troiani ad: The Greeks and Trojans verbed something to something (we expect an acc. with AD).
Graeci et Troiani ad Troiam: The Greeks and Trojans verbed something to Troy.
Graeci et Troiani ad Troiam pugnaverunt. The Greeks and Trojans fought AT Troy (making an adjustment to AD to complete the proper structure of the sentence).

Ok. Simple enough. Let's look at another sentence that doesn't start with a nominative.

Barbaris praemium novum donabimus.

Barbaris: Someone verbed something to/for the barbarians. (would probably need a preposition to be ablative, so we can rule that out)
Barbaris praemium: The reward verbed something to/for the barbarians OR Someone verbed the reward to/for the barbarians. (Discussion of which one is more likely, and the knowledge that we have to hold both possibilities, until we have something tell us for sure.)
Barbaris praemium novum: The new reward verbed something to/for the barbarians (seems more unlikely) OR Someone verbed a new reward to/for the barbarians.
Barbaris praemium novum donabimus. AH! WE WILL GIVE a new reward to/for the barbarians.

The joy of metaphrasing is you are providing students a framework to hold information on, one that works with English word order, without needing to treat the Latin like an impossible jigsaw puzzle.

I often use metaphrasing for warm-ups. I just throw up a list of words in different cases and they have to put the English meaning into the right slot in the metaphrasing sentence.

Of course, we discuss cases and such too. I don't want you to think we don't. But grammatical cases and names of functions often do not connect with MEANING. We need to help build skills that stretch between Bloom's knowledge skills to the higher analytical skills.

Here's another sentence where understanding metaphrasing and Latin phrasing will help. I like to teach the importance in seeing what ET connects.

Barbari equum et castra deserta Graecorum viderunt.

Barbari: The barbarians verbed something.
Barbari equum: The barbarians verbed the horse.
Barbari equum et : The barbarians verbed the horse and something (parallel construction therefore we EXPECT an accusative).
Barbari equum et castra: The barbarians verbed the horse and the camp
Barbari equum et castra deserta: The barbarians verbed the horse and the deserted camp
Barbari equum et castra deserta Graecorum: The barbarians verbed the horse and the deserted camp of the Greeks
Barbari equum et castra deserta Graecorum viderunt: The barbarians saw the horse and the deserted Greek camp.

Using a reading card (with a notch cut out of the left corner, thus the right side of the card covers up the rest of the sentence) keeps students from skipping around and hunting the verb or stringing together just the words they know.

Reading in word order cures a lot of ills with bad translations. I hope that helps.

Comments

helping with reading

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Ginny, I saw your post on LatinTeach and I am REALLY glad you shared it here (one of the biggest drawbacks with LatinTeach is that everything is closed behind locked doors and also disappears where no one will ever see it again). The two examples you gave here are great, especially since the person who posted the originally question to LatinTeach was teaching the "hunt and peck" style of translation, instead of actually reading.

I thought you might be interested in another reading help approach I've been using, which is to "build" the sentences, so that students are always dealing with complete sentences, and watching them getting more and more complex, until we get with the seriously complex sentence that Latin is so fond of! I've been doing it in a slideshow format, so you can click through step by step and see it taking shape - I'm publishing a new example each day here at the Latin Via Fables blog (http://latinviafables.blogspot.com/) (it's fun to do because they have an illustration, too):

http://latinviafables.blogspot.com/

[empressordinary.livejournal.com]

This helps so much! I'm trying to become a better (and ideally, eventually fluent) reader, and hadn't wrapped my mind around figuring things out as they are in Latin word order. I have a professor who I imagine reads and speaks as Cicero did and it leaves me in awe every time he reads anything Latin aloud to the class (which isn't terribly often since it's an intro to Roman civ class).

[ginlindzey.livejournal.com]

(I'm so distracted by your animated icon that I can't remember what I was going to write!)

ACTUALLY, what you need is Latin: How to Read it Fluently by Dexter Hoyos. CANE Materials sells it (google).

My biggest gripe with professors is that they never think about what the reading experience is like for them versus what it's like for the average person. I was once told that in order to get better at reading Latin I needed to just read MORE Latin. I wanted to cry. It would take me HOURS to properly go through a passage for class, with a variety of grammars, dictionaries, translations and texts. READ MORE?

No one ever stopped to ask me HOW I was reading. And that's what's important.

I've spent most of the year sight-reading Vergil with my AP students and feeling quite good about my own reading skills. And everytime I get lost in the Latin, I realize I either 1) didn't read the whole sentence or to the next punctuation and haven't gotten everything yet, or 2) need to just metaphrase to see what I'm missing.

It shouldn't be about whether you can parse the grammar. It's about whether you can absorb the shape of the Latin.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

I second the Hoyos book. It will rewrite your brain.