In 2004 an article in JACT magazine discussed what the ideal school edition of a Latin set text should look like. That is when this project and these workbooks started.
The ultimate designs are my own, but I have had the benefit of testing them out with a number of like-minded teachers. There is a still a long way to go, but one of them has defined the ultimate objective pretty well:
“if your book can handle the language side, that frees me to make the text live in class”
The starting-point for the workbooks is my own experience when teaching Latin set books. The editions we used assumed that my students knew a lot more of the language than they actually did. As a result, the class would get bogged down as I spent so much time explaining constructions and points of language. Simply in order to get things moving again, I had to give them a literal translation and tell them to memorise it.
So the students were being spoon fed while I, the teacher, was having to do all the work preparing translations, vocab lists, helpful notes on language, etc, etc.
I take it as axiomatic that, when they start to read real literary Latin, students should be trained to read aloud whole sentences from beginning to end, as the Romans themselves did. Reading whole sentences is the foundation of later fluency, no matter how difficult and unrewarding it may seem initially.
The “whole sentence” technique requires the reader to hold all possible meanings of each word “in suspense” until the meaning of the entire sentence finally becomes clear - a task of enormous complexity which only the subconscious brain can handle.
Effectively, then, I accept the “Krashen view” of second language acquisition, namely that it is predominantly via the subconscious part of our brain that we process and learn language. The conscious mind merely learns about language, i.e. it fills in the gaps that the subconscious brain has missed – the finer points of syntax, grammar etc. This is Krashen’s first, “Acquisition/Learning”, hypothesis.
To read Latin properly, therefore, the student has to learn to shut down their conscious mind and leave the way clear for their subconscious brain - the real powerhouse of language learning - to get on with the job. The traditional approach of “find the verb, the subject and the object” has its uses, but it employs the conscious mind, and students trained this way (as I was) are learning Latin as a sort of mathematical construct, not as a living language. They will always be slow and halting in their reading (as I am), never fluent.
However, the student won’t be able to learn anything new, either consciously or unconsciously, unless Krashen’s fourth, "Input", hypothesis is satisfied. [Input is the new language which is being fed into the student's brain and which they are trying to learn.] This hypothesis attempts to answer what Krashen calls “the most important question in the fields of language acquisition and language education: How does language acquisition occur?”. More specifically: “if i represents the last rule we have acquired, how do we move from i to i + 1, where i + 1 is the next structure we are ready to acquire?”
The Input hypothesis states that: “We acquire language in only one way: when we understand messages; that is, when we obtain “comprehensible input”. We acquire language, in other words, when we understand what we hear or what we read, when we understand the message.”
Small enough to fill the gaps
Effectively, Krashen is telling us that a sufficient proportion of the language being input must be already known to the student, so that their brain is able to “fill in the gaps” and thereby understand the whole message, including the language that is new. If not enough of the input language is already known, the gaps become too big. The brain is unable to fill them, it does not understand the message, and the student does not learn.
Krashen doesn't put a percentage on the proportions of known and unknown, but says the input should be "slightly harder" than the student knows already. 95% to 5%, maybe? The basic idea is that the teacher must make each increment of new material small enough so that the student "gets it"; make it too large and they won't "get it". [All this seems to me simply a variant on the old teaching principle of “move from the known to the unknown”, but none the worse for that!].
One way of making input comprehensible is to give students the meaning of the individual Latin words at the outset. With this basic information already known, the student can now read whole sentences at normal speed, enabling the subconscious brain to identify typical word groups and patterns and the meaning of the entire sentence, so developing the accurate expectations and “feel” for Latin which lead to fluency.
My interlinear “Wordmatch” sheets tie the Latin words very closely to the equivalent English word. I supplied them to teachers in April as revision material and they proved very popular at the time. It seems to me that they could be used as a form of comprehensible input for Latin. By mid-2009, therefore, I will be including interlinear Wordmatch sheets in all workbooks.
Interlinear translations have been used by teachers for many years. See for example the sample support publications supplied by CSCP for their verse and prose literature selections set for GCSE http://www.cambridgescp.com/page.php?p=pe^cla^intro. My own interlinears are similar to those of James Hamilton in the 1820’s, who also resequenced the Latin into English word order. Teachers whose students are taking Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae for A2 this year may be interested in the Hamiltonian translation on Google Books: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=uoALAAAAYAAJ&pg=PR1&dq=sallusts+thomas+hamilton#PPA35,M1
At the moment these interlinear translations provide the best comprehensible input I can think of for Latin. However, it remains to be seen how effective they are in practice, and of course Classics teachers must also be persuaded by the theories of Professor Krashen!
Note on Professor Stephen Krashen
Professor Krashen has been writing about Second Language Acquisition (
This article http://www.sk.com.br/sk-krash.html is a good place to start. It outlines the five hypotheses, and I have tried to summarise the two key ones above. Really, however, it is best to let Krashen speak for himself. Start with his book Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning, which is available on-line at his website www.sdkrashen.com In particular, read pages 1 to 11 of the Introduction which set out the five hypotheses.
However, that book was written in 1981 and spends a lot of time on the Monitor hypothesis, which was perhaps more important then than it is now. So I would strongly recommend you purchase “Explorations in Language Acquisition and Use” which represents Krashen’s more recent views (2003).
Krashen suggests five hypotheses. However, only two of them are (I think) really fundamental - the Acquisition/Learning hypothesis, and the Comprehensible Input hypothesis; I would concentrate on these first. The other three, the Monitor, the Natural Order and the Affective Filter hypotheses, are for various reasons secondary to these two core ideas.
Krashen writes in a pleasingly non-academic style which is easily accessible to the layman. For example, after discussing the comprehensible input hypothesis, he writes:
“Now that we have some idea of the input/comprehension hypothesis, I can share two mystical, amazing facts about language acquisition. First, language acquisition is effortless. It involves no energy, no work. All an acquirer has to do is understand messages. Second, language acquisition is involuntary. Given comprehensible input and a lack of affective barriers (see below), language acquisition will take place. The acquirer has no choice. In a theoretical sense, language teaching is easy: All we have to do is to give students comprehensible messages that they will pay attention to, and they will pay attention if the messages are interesting.” (Explorations in Language Acquisition and Use, p. 4).
(2010). Here's a link to a BBC Horizon programme of 1983 about Language Learning. Krashen gives a teaching lesson in German using the comprehensible input method: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K11o19YNvk Note the "big moment" at 2.01 :