intermediate text for Ethiopian students

Bill and Stephanie Black bnsblack at yimesgin.org
Tue Jun 19 02:06:53 EDT 2001


I suppose no teacher of Greek feels they've found the perfect textbook (including the one they themselves have written, or are writing in their head), but we all keep looking, don't we?  In this case, I'm trying to find an appropriate English-language intermediate Greek text for third-semester students at Evangelical Theological College in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.  As I'm new to ETC, it's the first time I've worked with this population of students.  I'm looking for a text that has potential for people who: 
--sometimes have limited English, therefore written explanations of grammatical concepts ought to be as idiom-free as possible (this tends to rule out some of the more recent 'user-friendly' texts--the humor doesn't translate well);

--are not from a reading culture, and when they do read may not be at ease with the Latin alphabet (Amharic has its own syllabic alphabet), so it will help if written explanations are as concise as possible;

--are cash-poor, so have difficulty purchasing imported books (the basic wage for the rare jobs that are available equals about 30 cents US per hour).  Most course texts at ETC are made available in the form of photocopied readers.  Ethiopia isn't party to any international copyright convention, so technically we can do this with impunity, but we prefer to do it only with the approval of a generous author/publisher.  

In addition, I'm looking for something that takes advantage of recent linguistic approaches to NT Greek, and that has abundant illustrations of NT syntax.  Don't worry, I realize my wish list is unattainable!  It did occur to me, however, that someone in the B-Greek world might have some valuable insight.  Or some of you may have done your own outlines of an intermediate course for students in similar settings, which would help get us started. 

I'd be happy for any thoughts on this, on- or off-list.  Please don't refer me to any web pages, as at this point I have email but not internet access.  Ethiopia has one internet server and the waiting list for an account is three years long--I often feel that the information superhighway ends in a footpath at my front door!  If you have a web page you believe would be especially useful, you could email the page itself to me off-list.  If it looks promising, I'll find a way to follow up.

Thanks in advance for your help.  ETC is the premier theological college in Ethiopia and these students often go on to become the teaching staff and administrators of the other colleges and bible training institutes throughout Ethiopia--a country which has been officially Christian since the fourth century, and which now has perhaps the fastest church growth rate in the world.  A solid grounding in biblical languages for them at this early stage has a payoff in the future when they (and their students in turn) join the ranks of tomorrow's African theologians.  A worthy project!



Stephanie Black



Stephanie L Black, PhD
Evangelical Theological College
Ethiopian Graduate School of Theology
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
bnsblack at yimesgin.org


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-greek/attachments/20010619/79ce4763/attachment.html 


More information about the B-Greek mailing list