Teaching Classical Languages

The latest issue of the journal Teaching Classical Languages, edited by John Gruber-Miller of Cornell College, has now been made available for download.

Articles in this issue include:

• Rebecca Harrison, "Exercises for Developing Prediction Skills in Reading Latin Sentences" (describes more than 20 field tested exercises to help beginning and intermediate students become more efficient readers of Latin)
• Peter Anderson & Mark Beckwith, "Form-Focused Teaching for the Intermediate Latin Student" ( introduces teachers to form-focused instruction, a pedagogy that integrates grammar instruction within a communicative context)
  
• Albert Watanabe, "The 2010 College Greek Exam" (an analysis of students' strengths and weaknesses on the 2010 College Greek Exam)

New Issue of "Teaching Classical Languages" Now Online

The Classical Association of the Middle West and South (CAMWS) has just announced that the new issue of their online journal Teaching Classical Languages has been published for immediate download at their official website.

Articles in this issue include:

• "From Literal to Literary: A Translation Project for Latin Poetry Classes" by Marcia Lindgren, Life Blumberg, and Joshua Langseth
• "Building Ties Between College and High School Latin Programs" by Ariana Traill, Francesca Tataranni, Laurie Jolicoeur, and Krisanna Zusman
• and a Special Section, "Perspectives on the new Standards for Latin Teacher PreparationPerspectives" by Ronnie Ancona, Erik Collins, Cathy Daugherty, Cory Holec, Ken Kitchell, Robert Patrick, and Lee Pearcy.

The editors of TCL are currently welcoming articles "offering innovative practice and methods, new theoretical approaches, or reporting on empirical research in teaching and learning Latin and Greek."

Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation

The American Classical League has just announced that the newly published ACL-APA Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation document is now available for free on its website.

Professor Ronnie Ancona, Vice President of the American Philological Association comments, "This is a valuable document for anyone teaching, planning to teach, or training those to teach Latin. It was written by a joint task force from ACL and APA. There will be a Plenary Session on the Standards at the ACL Institute this summer. We hope to also have a session on them at APA in San Antonio."

The Standards describes "the knowledge, skills, and understanding" of the beginning Latin teacher (a professional with 2 years or less experience in the classroom) in the areas of Content Knowledge, Pedagogical Knowledge and Skill, as well as Professional Development. The document is 22 pages, including a table of contents, and is quite readable.

The American Classical League has other reports available on its website, including the Standards for Classical Language Learning (referenced in the Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation) and the Report for State Certification Requirements for Teachers of Latin from the Joint Committee on Classics in American Education, a committee of the American Philological Association and the American Classical Association.

Joyful Latin Learning!

Are you reading Justin Schwamm's Joyful Latin Learning blog? If you aren't, you really ought to be! This is an interactive web project with the aim of building a collaborative and "joyful learning community" focused on Latin and the Roman Empire. Building on the principles of Paideia and the Trivium, as well as integrating the two main pedagogical approaches to Latin, Joyful Latin Learning aims to create and share content and stories with a wide online audience.

Teaching Classical Languages: A New Online Electronic Journal

We have just received an exciting new announcement from John Gruber-Miller, professor of Classical and Modern Languages at Cornell College and the author of When Dead Tongues Speak: Teaching Beginning Greek and Latin.

Teaching Classical Languages is a peer-reviewed electronic journal dedicated to exploring how we teach (and how we learn) Latin and Greek. It is meant for all who teach Latin and Greek, graduate students, coordinators, and administrators. Teaching Classical Languages is the successor of CPL Online and is sponsored by the Classical Association of the Middle West and South.

The mission of Teaching Classical Languages is to provide accessible, high quality research that offers Latin and Greek teachers immediate classroom applicability and long-term theoretical approaches that can help them become better teachers. As an electronic journal, Teaching Classical Languages has a unique global outreach. It offers authors and readers a multimedia format that more fully illustrates the topics discussed, and provides hypermedia links to related information and websites.

The first issue offers innovative articles about social networking in the Latin classroom, using music in beginning Greek, and core vocabulary in beginning Greek textbooks. All three articles take advantage of online publication, offering screen shots, audio of the songs, handouts for the classroom, or appendices that list the common core vocabulary in two popular Greek textbooks.

Andrew Reinhard, "Social Networking in Latin Class: A How-To Guide"

Georgia L. Irby-Massie, "'That Ain't Workin'; That's the Way You Do It': Teaching Greek through Popular Music"

Rachael Clark, "Greek Vocabulary in Popular Textbooks"

Teaching Classical Languages welcomes articles offering innovative practice and methods, advocating new theoretical approaches, or reporting on empirical research in teaching and learning Latin and Greek. Please take a moment to take a tour through the new journal and spread the word.

Teaching Latin Efficiently

Thomas M. Hayes shares a fascinating article on his wiki, Ut Discamus Omnes, entitled "Skinning the Latin Cat." This is a fascinating discussion regarding the two concepts of "disambiguation" and "economy" in teaching Latin morphology, which is a very fancy way of saying "Which endings do we concentrate most of our energy teaching to our students so that they can read and understand Latin efficiently and quickly?" Hayes compares the huge collection of grammatical endings in Latin to a big hardware store full of tools, some that are more likely to be used than others. It's a fascinating article and he discusses some experimentation he has done in the classroom as well as the ramifications of an approach that considers the "bottom line" when teaching forms.

An Important Question!

There's a wonderful entry today on Kristina Chew's We Go With Him Blog entitled "What does it take to be a(n autism) teacher?" While it's not necessarily about teaching Latin or Greek, though it does include reflections of Professor Chew's experiences as a beginning and developing Classics teacher. What does it take to ignite the learning spark in students? A very worthy question (for Latin and special education teachers and everyone else) as the school year begins!