teaching phrasing/chunking in AP--or seeing what you're reading

[ginlindzey]

I just posted this to the AP list (below).  I started the thread with this comment yesterday:

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I have been working hard to get my Latin 3's to work more on seeing phrasing than rushing to look up words, because I know my two AP students rush to look up words before seeing the phrasing. However, not much effort is going into this on their part.

I can see it's more critical than vocab and can lead to better guessing of unknown words from proper context, but I'm not convincing them of that.

Is there any particular exercise that any of you do to promote better chunking, better seeing of phrasing? I'm thinking I should come up with an exercise for midweek to give to both groups (same class time/split level).

I feel it's like magic for me now that I see phrasing so easily, and in word order. I only know of 1 student out of the 3's and AP's (mind you, that's only a total of 9 students) who actively incorporates my reading methodologies and things I've been trying to teach them. This year (but not the last 2) he is the top student. (I think he just finally looked around and decided he was smarter than everyone else and it was time to prove it, ya know...)

I want the rest to get it, esp the two AP students. Because it isn't just about seeing the endings and matching stuff up like a secret code. It's seeing the phrasing and the pictures as they unfold and worrying about the English second, which you can then translate better anyway for having taken time to see the phrasing and the pictures.

> Metaphrasing has been somewhat unsuccessful with poetry (at

> least for me), because in many instances, the sentences are a

> bit long and grammar a bit scattered that students lose track

> of everything nor do they make connections.

Hmmmm.... I have found it helped me out of quite a few jams when I realized my own understanding was going off track. But what I find I can do (most likely because of been working on the whole concept of READING versus DECODING for the last decade both with students and my own personal reading habits) is see whole phrases and clauses or, if need be, eliminate them to see the basic skeleton underneath as well. I gave my APs the Dido wandering as a wounded doe passage to translate on their last test, thinking I had made a big deal out of it and knowing that it is an important passage, but didn't really think about how tricky it is to put into good English. I can *read* it, see the phrases and clauses as they flow over the page, see the pictures painted, understand the nuances of the word order, and love the Latin for the Latin. And even though I know *exactly* what it means, the English is so less graceful. (Hmmm...suddenly I feel the urge to try some creative writing myself with the passage....)

 

>

> I have been trying to get students to rewrite the poetry into

> a more prose word order

And my gut tells me that this is exactly the wrong direction to go. Please, please don't take offense, Keith! This is the sort of thing I probably would have done when I first started teaching in the late 80s. But all that I've read by Dexter Hoyos about reading in word order makes me think that this is just not the way to go. It reinforces that idea that Latin is in mixed up word order.

There's an incredible beauty to the word order and the phrasing. And if we weren't marching at such a horrific clip through these dactylic hexameters, we could slow down long enough to talk about it.

Sometimes one way to deal with what seems odd word order to us is to read it outloud, to think about how a Roman might have emphasized the words as they flowed along in the story. Here's the passage I was talking about (thank you,www.thelatinlibrary.com, I love you):

uritur infelix Dido totaque uagatur

urbe furens, qualis coniecta cerua sagitta,

quam procul incautam nemora inter Cresia fixit

pastor agens telis liquitque uolatile ferrum

nescius: illa fuga siluas saltusque peragrat

Dictaeos; haeret lateri letalis harundo.

Students really botched up the relative clause. No surprise. But think of it from the point of view of the storytelling. First that the shot/spent arrow visually has pierced the doe--from front to back. And then there's the clause describing the doe: far away, unknowing, just wandering among the Cretan woods; pierced (by whom?), then the shepherd hunting with weapons; who himself unwittingly leaves behind the swift/flying shaft/weapon--with that emphasis in the enjambment of not knowing. The story is told BEAUTIFULLY in word order. Makes you wonder what the shepherd was doing, just shooting arrows in the air? Aiming at squirrels up close and not noticing where the arrow ended up? Perhaps the point is that a hunter who knew he shot a doe would have tracked it and finished the job of killing it.

But here's our Dido, shot by Cupid, lethal weapon clinging to her side, so to speak.

There are a couple of things I would want my students to be able to do (which they don't/can't yet), which is to be able to see how to simplify to make sure they have the right *shape* of the thing. Look again at this relative clause:

quam procul incautam nemora inter Cresia fixit

pastor agens telis liquitque uolatile ferrum

nescius:

This can be divided into two parts:

quam procul incautam nemora inter Cresia fixit

pastor agens telis

and

liquitque uolatile ferrum

nescius:

This second part is easier than the first, so let's ignore it. Now to just the first part:

quam procul incautam nemora inter Cresia fixit

pastor agens telis

We know that a relative clause will have a basic shape: subject verb object--right? But can you see it yet? How about now, taking out the prep phrase?

quam procul incautam ... fixit

pastor agens telis

How about now, taking out the adverb?

quam ... incautam ... fixit

pastor agens telis

How about now, taking out the participial phrase modifying pastor?

quam ... incautam ... fixit

pastor

How about now, taking out the adjective, which at least we can now see goes with quam?

quam ... fixit / pastor

And there it is: whom/which the shepherd pierced (with that shot arrow that's already sticking through either side of the doe!)

I don't want to *change* the word order; I want, now, I suppose, to build it back up.

The thing is, I *immediately* see that nemora inter Cresia is a prep phrase. I *immediately* see that agens telis goes with pastor. I don't think word for word when I read; I think chunk for chunk, phrase for phrase, clause for clause.

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Maybe I should print this for my students....

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That was the original post.  There was a reply, but the other teacher was talking about possibly getting students to rewrite poetry as prose. That defeats the purpose.  So here are my comments: