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Treebanking Ancient Greek in High School

Posted: November 11th, 2015, 11:14 am
by Jonathan Robie
STOA recently had an article on treebanking as a way of teaching Greek. The Perseus community is pushing this approach, which I've been following with some interest. Here's a teaser, follow the link for the entire article.

Treebanking Ancient Greek in High School: what my students learned, what I learned
The theoretical premise for this attempt was that the methodology of translating ancient Greek in Italian High School is similar to the process of dependency treebanking. The traditional method has a strong linguistic attitude: it requires complete analysis of the text divided into single sentences, according to a specific hierarchical structure, and the assignment of morphological and syntactic values to every single element according to traditional grammars. These tasks are performed with very limited use of the dictionary; then, a complete translation follows this established order, in order to ensure an easier conversion of the sentence into the new language. Treebanking seems to reproduce this process closely, but providing an alternative, aesthetically enjoyable and visually useful interface.

The experiment was performed with 22 students of 14 years of age, who were beginners in ancient Greek. These young cavies were involved in a four-days workshop of Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank, which took place in the School’s Informatics Lab.

Re: Treebanking Ancient Greek in High School

Posted: November 11th, 2015, 4:55 pm
by Stephen Carlson
Grammar-translation with a visual interface?

Re: Treebanking Ancient Greek in High School

Posted: November 11th, 2015, 8:56 pm
by Jonathan Robie
Stephen Carlson wrote:Grammar-translation with a visual interface?
At its worse, I'm pretty sure it can be that. I suspect identifying subjects and objects of verbs, for instance, is a great way to use the tool, and it can be done without a lot of English verbalization. When you start classifying everything with grammatical vocabulary .... it can quickly devolve into grammar translation.

I'll try to ping Bob Gorman, I think he takes a different approach to treebanking in the classroom.