[b-hebrew] Ancient Language Acquisition
Trevor Peterson
06peterson at cua.edu
Mon Mar 1 18:39:02 EST 2004
Ken Penner wrote:
> Is anyone willing to share comments on Paul Overland's article, "Can
> Communicative Methods Enhance Ancient Language Acquisition," _Teaching
> Theology and Religion_ 7:51-57 (supplemented by
> www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/journal/overland.html) or "Benefits and
> Strategies of Communicative Language
> Learning" at
> http://personal.ashland.edu/~poverlan/holes/comm-lang-lrng-ovrview.pdf?
After reading only the latter piece from the Web, I think I have a
general idea of what he's getting at. (Let me know if there's something
in the TT&R article that significantly alters the picture.) I've only
ever taught using more traditional methods, and right now I'm not in the
class room at all. I do have a certain attraction to this sort of thing,
though. I've tried out some of Buth's materials on myself (not on
others), and I can see some of the benefit. One significant problem with
all of these methods, though, is that they require reconstruction of the
language students are going to be monkeying with. Unlike with modern
languages, where a native speaker or someone with near native speaker
competence can evaluate the accuracy of students' independently
constructed utterances, with ancient languages the check falls to the
teacher's intuitive grasp of the language. Granted, some teachers will
be better at this than others; but even the best of teachers will not
have an absolute answer. (Or if so, the answer will by no means be
agreed among other scholars.) You yourself should know better than most
how much controversy surrounds the Hebrew verbal system, for instance,
which can introduce some difficult questions into any effort to teach
students how to construct their own sentences. Of course, the closer
parallels we can find in the ancient evidence, the more confidence we
can exercise, but even then there are questions of whether samples from
the biblical corpus represent one or several dialects. It would seem
counterproductive for students to internalize a conglomerate that is not
really any one dialect.
Perhaps the benefits are worth the risks. I'm not sure they're not. I
only point out what I consider to be the weightiest objection.
Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics
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