[B-Greek] Funk and 'monitors'

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sun Jun 3 09:15:07 EDT 2007


Certainly Robert W. Funk's _Beginning-Intermediate Grammar of  
Hellenistic Greek_ is a dated book; the 1977 printing that has been a  
B-Greek sponsored project for the last couple years is 40 years old.  
There are a few things (but not many) that I would alter, most  
notably the treatment of voice. To be sure, there's no nonsense about  
"deponents," but (a) the paradigms (as in several other NT grammars!)  
include middle forms of LUW that don't exist in the GNT, and (b)  
there's the standard notion of middle voice as a strange sort of  
halfway house between the basic polarity of active and passive.

NEVERTHELESS, I think that BIGHG aims at getting students as quickly  
as possible to "understand sentences" by "learning the structure  
signals" as is set forth in the Introduction. While I think that  
Randall's  classroom instruction through dialogue in Koine Greek with  
Koine Greek texts in hand is undoubtedly the preferable method, I  
fear it will become standard practice in the Koine Greek classroom  
about as soon as my views on Greek voice are taken account of in  
textbooks. For better or worse, the vast majority of new students of  
Biblical Greek are going to be coping with it through textbooks  
written in English and relying upon analogues of traditional English  
grammar. I really cannot imagine what it would be like to learn a  
linguistic "meta-language" first in order to make sense of the  
structures of Koine Greek that one will go on to seek to gain some  
real measure of fluency in reading. I do think that READING Greek  
must be the objective of Koine Greek pedagogy, not translation  
exercises involving creation of some intelligible target-language  
equivalent that will, at best, fall short of any "dynamic" or  
idiomatic accuracy. But I think that one can learn to recognize and  
understand immediately the morphological elements (and their  
variants) and habituate oneself to reading the text with some degree  
of fluency without any notion of target-language equivalents. Parsing  
may be a tool for beginners, but I've never been able to understand  
how anyone who's been working on Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy for  
several years can still be dependent upon the Perseus parsing tool.

My teaching of ancient Greek focused upon Classical Attic, and the  
textbook that I used for the last decades of my teaching career was  
the JACT "Reading Greek" series; I supplemented that with added  
materials of my own creation, but I never saw anything better  
(Oxford's "Athenaze" is similar, but aimed more at the high-school,  
slower-paced level). For traditional approaches to Classical Attic,  
I'd recommend Hansen and Quinn or Mastronarde. BUT if I were called  
upon today to teach Biblical Greek and Funk's BIGHG were available in  
print form for my students, I wouldn't hesitate to use it in  
preference to any other Biblical Greek primer currently in print.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/

On Jun 3, 2007, at 6:04 AM, Randall Buth wrote:

>> W.Funk appears to have been under the influence of structuralism but
> he manifests this somewhat differently than E.V.N.Goetchius. Like
> Goetchius, his pedagogy is dependent on English syntax as a point of
> departure with the assumption that the student can comprehend a
> simplified analysis of English grammar. That assumption might have
> been a safe one fifty years ago but is certainly isn't a safe one now.
> Elizabeth Kline>

The scholar's name is "Robert W. Funk" or "Bob Funk." So far as I  
know, he never did use "W." as his identifier (nor "Dub-ya" either!).

>
> Thank you for the broader linguistic perspective.  I appreciate many
> of the mnemonic rules of thumb that Funk provides for students and
> giving a place to the grammar on the internet would be a poistivie
> contribution. In addition, as you raise grammar questions, the broader
> linguistic perspective must also ask what do these mnemonic rules do,
> not to mention the comparisons with English grammar?
>
> Rules of thumb help build what has been called a 'monitor'. A monitor
> is an analytical scaffolding around a language that language users use
> for checking their input/output. It is quite useful and regularly used
> when spelling or writing, but it can hide the real language learning
> process if users equate 'monitor building' with learning the language.
>
> To give an example from Hebrew, where no Greek turf needs defending:
> BibHebrew pedagogies tend to use analysis in order to introduce the
> language, e.g., by teaching students how to take roots and build
> verbs, or take words and extract roots. Some modern Hebrew courses do
> something something. However, Israeli children cannot perform such
> tasks until they are teenagers. They know how to say HIGGID and
> YAGGID, but don't know what its root is. That is an analytical skill
> that is outside the "core loops" of the language itself. In the end
> such methodologies are part of a discredited non/pre-theory called
> grammar-translation within second language acquisition studies.
>
> (NB: if a person only wants a monitor, then grammar-translation is OK,
> it's just that a monitor will forever leave a person outside the
> language. Such partial goals are certainly justified where someone is
> not intrinsincally interested in the literature of the language but
> only needs certain decoding skills àla graduate reading requirements.
> But I have the distinct feeling that many on this list are hoping for
> something deeper, and for those they might find useful a "truth in
> advertising label" stating that 'grammar-translation' does not lead to
> internalization.)
>
> ERRWSQE
> Randall Buth




More information about the B-Greek mailing list