[B-Greek] Ancient Greek-Grammar war?
R Yochanan Bitan Buth
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
Tue Feb 28 11:41:19 EST 2006
>In defense of the traditional grammatical approach to language
acquisition, it must be remembered--as our incoming freshmen make
abundantly clear--it takes 18 years or longer to learn a language "the
way children learn it." The grammatical approach enables one to shrink
that to 18 months or less.>
This is mixing the difference between knowing a language and being able to
analyze a language and makes farreaching claims about 'grammar translation'
that are not supported by experiment or by researchers in the field.
One point, especially, deserves some clarification. "Acquistion" is a
technical term within second-language acquisition research (SLA) that refers
to producing and controlling a language automatically at the speeds of
normal speech. One can process the language rapidly, whether listening,
READING, or speaking. How many students of Greek or Hebrew, after 10 years
of coursework, can listen to and understand a text that is read at normal
speeds of speech? How many German students in good programs [not all
programs!] can listen to a text read at normal speeds and understand it
after two to five years? By their fruit you will know the systems that work,
or not.
Traditional (18-20th century) "grammar-translation" approaches do not
produce "acquistion". That is what the classicist Francois Gouin so
poignnantly and painfully proved 130 years ago. (He applied classical
methods to learning German, with abysmal failure after a full year of
fulltime "classical approaches".) "Modern" (1950-ff) SLA research has backed
him on his claim that grammar-translation does not work. The grammatical
approach does not "shrink" the process, yet it remains a favorite with
teachers and administrations as easy to teach. Any failure belongs to the
students. However, with modern languages, grammar-translation can be
'reality tested', which is why most successful programs like Goether
Institute, Alliance Francaise, Berlitz, Israeli ulpanim, et al., do NOT use
"grammar translation". If they do not succeed they are out of business.
Ancient languages can hide behind "grammar translation" because there is no
simple reality self-check. On the otherhand, I have watched many a PhD
student work through years of study and training in Hebrew. The level of
language facility that they reach at the end of that process is FAR from
acquisition of even early levels of language fluency. 18 months do not
produce ACQUISTION in the language, and unfortunately, even 18 years of
grammar-translation do not do it. (I've tested this over and over with
visiting PhDs to Israel, where I can speak to them in simple Biblical
Hebrew. The typical response is, "I don't speak modern Hebrew." To which one
responds, TOV, RAQ ANI MEDABBER BI-SFAT HA_TORAH UVI-SFAT HA-NEVIIM,
VE-YAXOL-NU LE-HOSIF ... . "Fine, I am only speaking the language from the
tora and prophets. We can continue ... ." [Of course, for full fluency to
speak in Hebrew in depth on any subject one has to add many, many words
beyond BH. BH is half a language with accidental holes. "Dog" exists in BH,
"cat" doesn't. But the visitors mentioned above could not control even the
simple vocabulary at anything that sounds like fluency, and that, after a
PhD. No one is gainsaying their well-earned ability to do critical thinking
and research with the texts, but the field would be better off if the
majority had a fluent control of the language of interest. Incidently,
ancient Greek does not have this limited vocabulary problem, though fluency
remains a shared problem with BH.] This is no one's fault, of course, it is
simply the way the current system works. If students knew how they were
going to turn out, they might justifiably revolt at the beginning and demand
something that would produce equivalencies to the Monterrey Defense
Institute or the programs mentioned above. (They would probably be greeted
with responses like, "Fluency doesn't matter, since you're only interested
in reading and literature." That is how modern language programs have
sometimes justified ignoring SLA research.)
NB: I am not saying that SLA has final answers of any one method that works,
simply that SLA is fairly close to unanimous that "grammar-translation" does
not work. See Asher, Brown, Cook, Krashen, Lee, Postovsky, Swaffar, Terrell,
van Patten, Woodruff, ..., or broad introductions to language like Fromkin
(7th edition now?).
ERRWSQE
Randall Buth
Randall Buth, PhD
Director, Biblical Language Center
www.BiblicalUlpan.org
buth at jerusalemschool.org
and Lecturer, Biblical Hebrew
Rothberg, Hebrew University
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
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