[B-Greek] Ancient Greek-Grammar war?

L. Harris ljoharris at ckt.net
Mon Feb 27 23:27:54 EST 2006


>Grammar in Teaching and Learning Ancient Greek
>Having read the Mulroy paper and having shared many of his
>experiences and frustrations, I’ll add my own two bits, for what it’s
>worth. I have certainly felt the tug-of-war of opposing feelings
>about the role of grammar instruction as part of language teaching
>and learning, especially with respect to ancient Greek.

I wrote to Professor Melroy and shared some of the dialog I had been 
involved in regarding this issue. He very kindly wrote back and clairified 
some things about what he wrote. The following is his very short concise 
reply, which I found immensely informative.

Dear Linda,
Thanks for sharing this interesting dialogue with me.  I'm terribly busy
right now, but I would like to offer a couple of clarifications.  I don't
argue that you need to know English grammar in order to learn Greek or
Latin.  I argue that you need to understand foundational grammatical
concepts, especially the parts of speech.  These were defined in the
Hellenstic period.  The authors of the New Testament did not know a word
of English, but they probably understood the parts of speech and how to
decline nouns and conjugate verbs and so forth.  The alternative point of
view, defended by Randall Buth, is that one learns a language best by
immersion.  This is also called the communicative approach, and it is very
dominant in schools and colleges these days.  It is based on the
observation that people learn their mother tongues by immersion and don't
need to understand grammatical concepts.  The problem that critics of
immersion see is that people are very rarely genuinely immersed in a
second language.  You learn your native language by immersion 24/7 for
years with every possible incentive to learn.  Most courses based on
immersion have students partially immersed for just a few hours a week
during the school year.

I have enlarged my essay, The War Against Grammar, into book.  In this, I
add a historical argument against immersion.  During the high middle ages,
Latin was taught by immersion to students for whom it had become a second
language.  People noticed that the quality of writing was in a dreadful
state of decline.  This led to an academic reform in which the immersion
approach was replaced with grammatically based textbooks.  In them, Latin
grammar was explained in the students' native language.  This was one of
the reforms that led to the Renaissance.  Students not only learned Latin
better, but they gained great insights into their own native languages.
Before this, people thought that English, German, French, and Italian did
not even have grammars!  Among the first generations of students to
benefit from this reform was William Shakespeare.  The communicative
approach to language was discredited for centuries.  It seems to me that
its revival is an example of people who do not know the past being doomed
to repeat it.

David


I am looking forward to reading his book on the subject.

Linda Harris






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