[B-Greek] A Greek Pedagogical Question
Norbert Rennert
norbert.rennert at sil.org
Fri Jul 22 14:39:22 EDT 2005
Sorry about the last empty post. I don't know what happened that it went
out empty. Here is what I wrote:
Most modern language courses use graded reading material. There is
almost no beginner level reading material available for koine or ancient
Greek. That is one of the reasons I chose to use simple, beginner level
stories on my site. To ask a first year student to read the NT "as much
as possible" is a recipe for failure, especially when the only way he
got taught to do it is to stop and parse every word. Your reading speed
is down to about 1 or 2 words a minute. Imagine ESL classes where
students get taught to memorize the rules and paradigms of English, how
to interpret an advanced grammar tome, and consult an unabridged
dictionary and then told to read (and enjoy) the KJV of the Bible as
their only text. I wonder what the motivation level of those students
would be.
Seeing as there is no beginner level language material for koine Greek,
why not compose short simple stories and develop a reading curriculum
for it now? What is wrong with that? I know that it is not attested
ancient Greek, the student would probably also know that, but so what.
Its a stepping stone. What gets used most of the time could more
appropriately be called a stepping cliff. But I'm not surprised if Greek
professors resist this change in method; they were ones who managed to
succeed with the traditional method, so obviously "it works". I would
like to appeal to the Greek "experts" to consider writing short stories
and send them to me for inclusion to my site. Each story can be changed
into more than 100 combinations, thus greatly leveraging the amount of
appropriate reading level practise a student can read.
My goal in developing the site was to help myself (and others) get past
the parsing stage and give me fluency in reading. The stop and parse
method is extremely tedious and non-motivating. One of the greatest
factors for success is motivation. Nothing motivates like seeing
yourself make progress. I'm not against knowing the paradigms, but not
as a tool to learn to read Greek. So I do not see my method as replacing
traditional methods, but as a supplement. The traditional method did not
get me to read Greek. Reading simple stories in a controlled environment
where the student gets to control which aspect of language he will read
is a great way to speed up reading fluency.
Norbert Rennert
Canada Institute of Linguistics
http://www3.telus.net/norbertre/index.html
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