[B-Greek] Intensive Greek Refresher course
Benjamin Pehrson
benjamin_pehrson at sil.org
Sun Mar 13 09:40:07 EDT 2011
I just finished team teaching an intensive eight day Biblical Greek
refresher course for translation advisors/trainers in Papua New Guinea. I
hope some of the ideas I share here may be helpful to others.
This is the second time we've offered this course. The first time we did it
in ten days, and having those two extra days worked a little better. Both
times, we reviewed an entire first year grammar (using Mounce). Previously,
we were able to go a little slower and include some lessons on discourse
features. Here are some key components that have helped to make the course a
success...
1) We have stressed the idea that we are learning Greek in order to love God
and love others. We love God with our minds by learning Greek. And we do not
simply learn Greek for our own benefit but in order to love others through
sharing our knowledge/skills with others.
2) This course for translation advisors/trainers has happened in the same
years that we offer a 6-week Intro to NT Greek course and a 5-week Greek
Exegesis course to Papua New Guinean translators. The refresher course has
served to build up a larger pool of trainers/mentors who are ready to
facilitate for the longer intensive courses.
3) Leveling the playing field - it's easy for participants to be embarrassed
or feel guilty for needing to be a part of a course like this. But everyone
quickly realizes that it's better to go back and review than to continue
without it. It's humbling for everyone, but also a bunch of fun. And the
benefits of the course are evident from the very start.
4) Keep moving. The course includes a combination of grammar & morphology
explanation, looking at real examples, and oral learning techniques. We met
from 8:30 to 12:00 every morning and we never did anything for more than 20
or 30 minutes. We would alternate between five grammar lessons and six oral
learning sessions every morning. We also met from 3:00 to 4:00 every
afternoon to read from the NT, parsing words as we went.
5) Oral learning techniques - we are trying to facilitate learning by
involving the different senses, internalizing the language, and meeting the
needs of people with different learning styles. Two of the oral learning
sessions included singing Scripture songs taken from the NT. The other four
sessions included TPR (total physical response) exercises that included
pointing to body parts, picures, objects taken from the NT (animals, cups,
bread, etc.), people wearing role cards, doing motions for verbs. These oral
sessions even include different person/number exercises and tenses for the
verbs with appropriate hand/body motions to correspond to the morphology.
Because we are also training Papua New Guinean translators who are very used
to working in languages with phonetic spelling conventions, and because we
are a mixture of colleagues from many different countries (this course
included American, Dutch, British, Australian, and Korean participants), we
have followed a sort of hybrid Erasmian pronunciation. I would personally
like to pursue immersing myself in a combination of reconstruced Koine and
modern Greek pronunciation, but for now, this is what we are doing here.
6) Grammar/morphology summaries. I have written summaries of many of the
grammar/morphology lessons to give out as handouts. The chapters in Mounce
procede very slowly with much encouragement, comparison to English, etc.
People taking a refresher course very much appreciate seeing the main points
of the chapter summarized on one or two pages. I have also summarized the
100 pages of Wallace's uses of the article in four pages.
7) Quickly moving to examples. This was something I was learning from my
fellow trainer. I tend to give too much theory before looking at examples.
The participants appreciated moving to examples much more quickly. It worked
better to give a paradigm, quickly point out the key elements/consistencies,
and then start looking at short example sentences where we could illustrate
the morphology for that tense/voice/mood.
8) Focus on forms used in the NT. In a refresher course, the goal is to help
give the participants a jump start on reviewing the grammar on their own. In
eight days, not every tense/voice/mood can be covered with adequate time for
letting it sink in. Some things must be given a cursory treatment. But that
means that we need to focus on the forms that occur more frequently. There's
not much point in taking 5 minutes in this kind of course to explain the
morphology of a verbal form that occurs only two times in the NT.
9) Community of practice. A refresher course is pointless if we go out from
it and do not continue reading Greek and gaining a better understanding of
its grammar, syntax, semantics, and discourse structure. So we also shared
many ideas for continuing on, including ways that we can continue to be a
community of practice that reads Greek together and encourages one another
and holds each other accountable. This element seems to be missing for many
people who first learn Biblical Greek.
XAIREIN,
Benjamin Pehrson
Trainer in Advanced Biblical Studies
Ukarumpa Training Center
Papua New Guinea
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