[B-Greek] Best Practices for Teaching/Learning Greek

Louis Sorenson llsorenson at hotmail.com
Thu May 27 14:24:10 EDT 2010


Hello all,

After teaching a class trying some living language methodologies for ancient Greek (NT), I have a few questions which I am asking myself. I also have self-study students in mind and those who may be remote-study students. Many of these topics have been touched on here or there in the b-Greek emails and some directly in Buth's and Rico's books from their persepctives. But putting them into a list helps me realize I still have a lot of questions. 

The questions are broken down into the following categories:

BEST PRACTICES FOR SELF-STUDY STUDENTS
USING LIVING LANGUAGE METHODOLOGIES
COMPOSITION AND TRANSLATION AND READING
INCORPORATION OF LIVING LANGUAGE METHODOLOGIES INTO TRADITIONAL CLASSES
ACCEPTANCE OF LIVING LANGUAGE METHODOLOGIES

BEST PRACTICES FOR SELF-STUDY/Remote STUDENTS
1. How does the self-study get  significant time in video?  Should they watch supplemental videos, watch class videos posted by others? Can one-way videos (not Skype where there is interaction) be of any value? 
2. How does the self-study get  significant time response to real-life 
question/answer methods rather than replying to a stock question where the answer is in an answer key?
3. How important is accountability? How does the self-study student make 
themselves acheive and do the work? They get no grade, pay no fees, 
etc. Would a club membership (like on Schole) with kind of attainment 
badge (=skill status) be of value and encouragement?

USING LIVING LANGUAGE METHODOLOGIES
4. To what extent do living language methods make a difference in 
increasing understanding and accelerating the learning curve?
5.  How much time does one need when using aural/visual learning methodologies compared to non-aural traditional methods? More, less, or the same?
6. Is there an age-appropriate limit for living language methods?  Older 
adults needing the systematic explanation of phrases and younger 
students more able to adapt (have less need) of grammatical explanations
 and more interested in using a language?
7. When should grammar be studied, concurrently or 
subsequentially?  Should grammar be studied systematically or ad hoc as in inductive methods?
8. What amount of non-Biblical words should be included?
9. How and when to wean a student off of speaking/hearing into reading or if reading
 was always a part, how and when to discontinue such methods (or is 
listening kept and not speaking?)

COMPOSITION AND TRANSLATION AND READING
10.  What type of composition methods are best, phrases, whole sentences, fill in the blanks, ktl?
11.  Does translating into English have more, less or equal value from composing into Greek?
12.  How does a self-study student know their translation/composition is OK?
13.  At what point are students expected to get longer sentences?  Is there
 value in having longer involved sentences, even though they may be 
simple?
14.  Does reading long passages (a story like Athenaze or JACT) give more 
to the student than traditional independent sentence based grammars?


INCORPORATION OF LIVING LANGUAGE METHODOLOGIES INTO TRADITIONAL CLASSES
15.  Is it possible to take a grammar like Mounce, Croy, or story based 
grammars such as Athenaze, JACT, and Let's Study Greek (Hale) and use 
living language methods with it?  Has anyone tried this?
16.  Could a supplemental LLM class in addition to a traditional weekly 
class be more value?  (e.g. 3 classes a week, one with LLM methods 
covering the same material as the other two lessons which are taught the
 standard way) versus 3 traditional classes a week?


ACCEPTANCE OF LIVING LANGUAGE METHODOLOGIES
17.  What level of acceptance of ancient Greek living language methodologies will be accepted by institutions of higher learning and accreditation? Will demonstration of numerous students' capabilities (such as passing a Greek Exam) validate such methodologies, or will they be relegated to the shadows for the foreseeable future? 
18.   Do those decision makers in such institutions have any available criteria or standards by which to judge the success of ancient Greek LLM pedagogies?

Any answers or even more questions would be appreciated. Sometimes just reading through a list of such questions will get the mind to re-evaluate how they would like to learn/teach. 

Louis Sorenson





 		 	   		  
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