Teaching Ancient Languages: a selected guide to available material
Around three years ago I wrote this guide for the Higher Education Academy, Subject Centre of History, Classics and Archaeology. In it I try to offer a description of the main teaching material available for Latin and Greek: grammars, textbooks, auxiliary material, dictionaries, etc., pointing out the main characteristics for each one.
Excerpt from the Introduction:
"Some decades ago the material related to the teaching of Latin and Greek was limited to a number of standard textbooks and either standard or individually generated auxiliary material. A number of these textbooks dated back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their enduring use indicates their success (‘old’ here being synonymous with ‘traditional’ or ‘classic’). However, during the last decade or so their fitness-for-purpose in teaching today’s learners of ancient languages has been increasingly questioned with the result that an enormous number of new publications related to the teaching of Latin and Greek languages have appeared on the market. These new publications have responded to changes in the pedagogical methods of teaching modern languages in schools (e.g. an increasing oral/aural focus, use of vocabulary lists rather than dictionaries, the move away from the use of verb tables and rote learning) and the ever-increasing number of university students who are learning ancient languages ab initio as either undergraduates or postgraduates.While many of these publications have been developed for specific markets (e.g. with a focus on independent/distance learning, or acquiring reading fluency, or for fast-track language acquisition, or for GCSE), some are being used successfully in other contexts. This means that ‘classic’ teaching materials share bookshop shelves and internet space with an ever-increasing range of new publications. In short, the range of potential material from which language teachers can choose has never been wider.This is a wonderful state of affairs but it can be both difficult to keep up with the range of new possibilities and easy to get lost in this dense pedagogical wood.Thus, it can be difficult for even the experienced language tutor to choose appropriate texts for the level of language work required by individual courses within Higher Education Institutions (HEIs)."
You can download the booklet as a pdf by clicking HERE.