When Dead Tongues Speak: Teaching Beginning Greek and Latin

Front Cover
John Gruber-Miller
Oxford University Press, Nov 2, 2006 - Foreign Language Study - 256 pages
When Dead Tongues Speak introduces classicists to the research that linguists, psychologists, and language teachers have conducted over the past thirty years and passes along their most important insights. The essays cover a broad range of topics, including cognitive styles, peer teaching and collaboration, learning disabilities, feminist pedagogy, speaking, and writing. Each contributor addresses a different problem in the learning process based on his or her own teaching experience, and each chapter combines a theoretical overview with practical examples of classroom activities. The book was developed for classroom use in Greek and Latin methodology classes in M.A. and M.A.T. programs. It will also appeal to Latin and Greek language instructors who want to get current with the latest scholarship and pedagogical models.

From inside the book

Contents

Introduction
3
Setting the Scene
7
Focus on the Learner
25
Focus on the Language
111
An Annotated Bibliography
221
Index
235
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 86 - Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions, it is populated - overpopulated - with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process.
Page 65 - Learning disabilities is a general term that refers to a heterogeneous group of disorders manifested by significant difficulties in the acquisition and use of listening, speaking, reading, writing, reasoning, or mathematical abilities. These disorders are intrinsic to the individual, presumed to be due to central nervous system dysfunction, and may occur across the life span. Problems in self-regulatory behaviors, social perception, and social interaction may exist with learning disabilities but...
Page 179 - A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one would find fault with what he has done.
Page 86 - And this certainty is permanent: the actors speak, act, torment themselves, debate 'questions of universal import', without losing, thanks to this little flag displayed on their foreheads, any of their historical plausibility. Their general representativeness can even expand in complete safety, cross the ocean and the centuries, and merge into the Yankee mugs of Hollywood extras: no matter, everyone is reassured, installed in the quiet certainty of a universe without duplicity, where Romans are Romans...
Page 86 - ... my thinking about this is the sense that language is power, and that, as Simone Weil says, those who suffer from injustice most are the least able to articulate their suffering, and that the silent majority, if released into language, would not be content with a perpetuation of the conditions which have betrayed them. But this notion hangs on a special conception of what it means to be released into language: not simply learning the jargon of an elite, fitting unexceptionably into the status...
Page 194 - Comprehending is critical because it requires the learner to reconstruct the structure and meaning of ideas expressed by another writer. To possess an idea that one is reading about requires competence in regenerating the idea, competence in learning how to write the ideas of another.
Page 75 - Cooperative learning is group learning activity organized so that learning is dependent on the socially structured exchange of information between learners in groups and in which each learner is held accountable for his or her own learning and is motivated to increase the learning of others.
Page 88 - marginal environment " were present. Moreover, the marginal environment was one between the family (which as such used a language other than Latin) and an extra-familial world of learning (which used Latin). The fact that the marginal environment was primarily a linguistic one only heightened the initiatory aspects of the situation, for the learning of secret meanings and means of communication is a common feature of initiatory rites. It is through ability to communcate that man achieves a sense...
Page 86 - At the bedrock level of my thinking about this is the sense that language is power, and that, as Simone Weil says, those who suffer from injustice most are the least able to articulate their suffering, and that the silent majority, if released into language, would not be content with a perpetuation of the conditions which have betrayed them.
Page 186 - The Teacher as Quality Control: Program Options, "30-44 in Frank M. Grittner, ed.. Student Motivation and the Foreign Language Teacher: A Guide for Building the Modern Curriculum. Report of Central States Conference on Foreign Language Education. Skokie, IL: National Textbook Co., 1974. 109 Wattenmaker. Beverly. "An Intensive Approach to High School Foreign Language Learning.

Bibliographic information