ginlindzey

This question came up during the committee meeting on Friday: Does reading aloud have any bearing on AP?

Before I go any further, let me add that there will be an oral component to the next certification test, but it will NOT be rigid nor will it be intimidating. It will count as a low percentage of the overall score. The discussion we were having at the time this question was raise, I believe, came when we were discussing weight, not whether to have it at all. We all agreed that an ability to pronounce Latin was very important to a beginning teacher....

Now, back to the question: does reading aloud have any bearing on AP? The person across the table from me was implying it did NOT, therefore should have little weight. I was perhaps the only person sitting at the table who had not yet taught an AP class, so I had to bite my tongue a little. I wanted to shout out, "YES! YES! YES!"

When you READ a passage of Latin outloud, ESPECIALLY Vergil (well, perhaps not especially), it flows more, becomes more ALIVE and more LOGICAL when read as if it were meant to be spoken and LISTENED to!

I do a lot of thinking about reading, about what allows one to read more fluently, what helps one to develp and expand vocabulary, how learning to read in English relates to learning to read in Latin, etc. Perhaps I place too much emphasis on my own experiences, on my own desires to learn to read more fluently, of remembering the frustration as an undergraduate of not feeling like I was developing any fluency, etc....

So, why do I think reading aloud matters so much? I think it is where you see and hear it all truly come together. Back when we read Catullus (11? 13?) last year, I kept making my students reread THE WHOLE THING OUTLOUD as we added each line to our understanding. We'd work through each line, but then go back and CONNECT what we had. We did this until we were through the poem entirely, and then read it again.

I do NOT want my students to recite ENGLISH translations to me when I ask whether they know X poem, like my niece did when she was in AP Ovid/Catullus. And she's a brilliant young lady. Funny thing, it is HER TEACHER who is always saying that students MUST be able to READ Latin to do well on the AP exam. But I don't think they read aloud much. What I think she really means, and I'm not saying this to be critical, but they really need to be able to translate. Reading is yet another step.

Another teacher at the committee meeting made this comment: you get better at READING while teaching; that as college students we were better at grammar.

WHY???

What a comment! But is this true? When you consider that in college your Latin classes assign you to read X many lines of Latin a night, SHOULDN'T you be better at READING?

I was probably better at grammar. I know I knew more grammar then than I remember now. I taught middle school for so long that I have forgotten details of certain grammatical structures. That is to say, when I meet things in context, I have no problem. But I confess I had to double check something on i-stem nouns the other day. And while I can tell you what a passive periphrastic is, when someone mentioned something about an active periphrastic, I had to stop and wonder if I actually *knew* what it was.

This is where I keep thinking that if we taught reading skills EXPLICITLY, in a 101 level course, not only would we graduate better readers of Latin, but these same students would also be able to read more at a go, perhaps more on their own.

But back to her comment: why is it that we get better at reading when teaching? I think it's because of REPETITION. Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps it's maturity. Perhaps it's simply that old adage doce ut discas.

But why not repetition? How do children learn to read? Repetition. Why did my students enjoy that Catullus poem? Repetition. Why did my 8th graders enjoy the Vergil passage I used to teach? Repetition. Repetition made the passage familiar. Repetition made the vocabulary familiar. Repetition made the structures understandable. Mind you, all of this repetition was OUT LOUD as well. Reading it, over and over....

When I was doing Ovid passages with my one advanced student this past year, I made a habit of always starting back several lines (at a natural break) and rereading what we had done previously before moving on to the next section with him. The thing that I liked the most was when I realized that Ovid was echoing language that was used 20 lines previously. Are you going to notice this at all if you are reading 5-10 lines at a time, never looking at more than what you are currently reading???

I've been thinking a lot about reading and how it applies to AP, and what I would do in my ideal AP class (and perhaps in my other classes next year). I was thinking that I would assign a different student to read every day, telling them the night before what they will be reading. So, let's say that 10 lines are due the next day; that student would be assigned the previous day's 10 lines plus the new 10 lines to read out loud. Since it would alternate, it would only be one person to grade a day. Part of the reading would be familiar from the day before, and part would be new. The grade would be weighted enough to make students take it seriously, plus it would have the added benefit of having students HEAR and read a large portion at a go before going over the translation/meaning.

My niece, when she took Vergil AP (she had both before she graduated from her high school a year early), she said she hated it. She hated the pace, she hated that they never got into any meaty discussions.... but I wonder if she would have hated it as much if instead of worrying about daily TRANSLATIONS they had focused more on daily READINGS? Hard to say, and she certainly had an excellent teacher--the number of 4's and 5's her students get are amazing.

And on a slightly related note, I'm wondering what it would take to get the brain to truly accept Latin as Latin, without English as an intermediary to meaning? And how do we get there? Would having a dedicated day for all Latin help? What if class on Fridays were discussed entirely in Latin? COULD I do that? Can I do this and not fall behind in the pacing (pacing, which I'm so bad at?)?

A new thought has entered my mind lately: I wonder if fluency in Latin is like a strope's test. I have a Nintendo DS game called Brain Age (and my son's DS to play it on) for stimulating your prefrontal cortex. A strope's test is where a word like BLACK appears but is colored BLUE and you have to say the COLOR and not the word. It's a bit tricky to turn off the part of the brain that wants very much to say the word and to only say the color. In like fashion, when I try to read Latin fluently, I try to just hear the Latin and to shut out the English echo in my head. And maybe it's just a matter of daily training.

ANYWAY. Those are just a few thoughts on the matter of reading aloud and AP.