Teaching Latin to Humans
How to Honor both the Language and the Learner
Starting about ten years ago, through a mix of monomania and dumb luck, I became proficient enough in Latin — and enough people I taught became proficient in Latin — that other people started caring what I thought about learning and teaching Latin.
The monomania is chronicled here. The dumb luck was that I found some friends who were teaching and learning Latin rapturously, crashed a Latin immersion camp without having taken a Latin class, was soon asked to teach there, and landed on the board and faculty of the North American Institute for Living Latin Studies, aka SALVI.
What snagged the eye, especially of teachers with dwindling programs, was that pretty much all of my students — not just a few smart kids — could understand Latin well, and many could write and speak it. These were otherwise normal high schoolers in a program I had been hired to create, a Latin 1–4 sequence with a 98% retention rate. But this is a mere jot in the story of hundreds of teachers who are coming to know and make known the Latin language in a way that has students flocking and colleagues gawking, or at least sneaking peeks through the window. Having had a front row seat and a pertinent background, I’ll save you the neck-craning and just tell you why what they do works.
There’s a saying in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) that “languages are learned, not taught.” In other words, it’s what happens in the learner’s brain that constitutes language learning; there’s no way for another person to make this happen, so “language teaching” at its truest consists of creating the right circumstances for learning. So what are these circumstances, and how do they work for Latin?
There are lots of ways of framing what it takes to know a language. Some are true to what we know about language and the brain; some aren’t. My favorite linguistically and cognitively sound way is articulated by Bill VanPatten, the Diva of SLA: Knowing a language has two faces, (1) a “Mental Representation” (MR) of the language and (2) “Skill” in the language.
Your MR is the implicit knowledge your brain uses to interpret or produce language, covering syntax, vocabulary, semantics, morphology, and phonology. Your MR of English is what tells you that Sappho takes the cake is fine, but something’s missing from *Sappho puts the cake. It’s what lets you know you can reread or rethink, but you can’t *resleep or *redrink, and that you can retell a story, but not retell me your name. It’s how you know what the s on the end of results does both in Your results are in and in This results in confusion. It’s how you know the pairs live/lived, give/gave, and drive/drove, and how you know the zillion uses of up and the one use of galore. It’s why you wonder whether darcel is a real English word, but not whether kpyxj is. In short, MR is the thing in your brain that tells you what’s possible in a particular language and what isn’t.
How did you get your MR of English? The answer is surprisingly simple: by understanding messages delivered to you in English. This is how any person gets an MR of any language. It doesn’t matter whether the language is ancient or modern, dead or alive, highly inflected or not, or whether the learner is young or old, inclined to analysis or not, acquiring her first language or her twelfth. All that matters is whether it’s a human language and the learner has a human brain.
When your brain matches the form of language you hear or read to its meaning, your MR grows. The brain, apparently, is wired to process linguistic input and integrate it into its picture of the language — its MR. It does not seem to be wired to turn information about a language, such as that presented in paradigms or teachers’ explanations, into MR. No matter how well it is taught, knowledge about a language tends to remain just that: knowledge about, rather than competence in. Actual competence relies on MR developed through vast input. Since this input has to be understood in order to be processed, it is often called comprehensible input (CI).
If MR is what a language-knowing brain knows, linguistic Skill is what a language-knowing person can do, the application of MR to target tasks such as following an argument, explaining a thought, or savoring an epigram. Skill does not refer to the ability to decline a third-declension i-stem adjective, identify a concessive clause, or convert a sentence from direct to indirect speech. These are extra-linguistic tasks in the sense that they neither invoke nor enhance MR of a language, aren’t part of communication, and aren’t linked to the ability to engage in tasks such as holding a conversation or reading a book.
Actual linguistic Skill is the goal of any language course, ancient or modern. The only difference between learning a modern and a classical language is that, although developing MR of a classical language happens the exact same way as with any other language, the Skills most students pursue are different. They don’t have to be — one can do the same things with Latin as with any other language — but the goal of reading texts is primary in most programs.
So, how does one develop linguistic Skill? First, by building the MR that is the foundation of Skill, and, second, by engaging in the target task itself. If you want to be good at reading Latin odes, you need a thorough MR of Latin and you need to read lots of Latin odes. If you want to be good at Latin small talk, you need a thorough MR of Latin and lots of Latin small talk.
Unfortunately, few programs provide the heaps of comprehensible input necessary for MR, with the result that when students try to read they don’t stand a chance of genuine comprehension. Lacking a strong MR of Latin, students are literally trying to read a language they don’t know.
Many teachers try to counter this by offering “reading strategies” such as metaphrasing and gapping or rules for reading, giving tips such as “when you see ita ut, anticipate a result clause,” or simply demanding that students constantly review grammar. But these are not ways of increasing one’s ability to comprehend. They are ways of coping with one’s inability to comprehend.
If I summon my explicit knowledge of grammar, vocabulary, or “reading strategies” to make sense of a sentence, I have not gotten better at understanding Latin; I have merely coped with my inability to understand Latin at that level. It’s sometimes important or rewarding to be able to cope with texts above one’s level. But why structure our Latin courses so that this is the best possible outcome?
The surest way to get genuine, real-time, Latin-as-Latin comprehension of advanced language is first to get genuine comprehension of slightly less advanced language, right down to the simplest Salve.
This is where the flocked-to teachers I mentioned set themselves apart. They are learning how to furnish the input necessary for MR, which is necessary for linguistic Skill. It boils down to two things: (1) scads of reading material that is easy enough and interesting enough that students can and want to read dozens of pages at a sitting, and (2) speaking to students in the target language, which allows us to give loads of input at the exact level our students need, and to provide input of interest to our particular students, maximizing the likelihood that they will keep listening.
In a way, this is a cruel combination. Many Latin teachers aren’t comfortable speaking Latin, because they either don’t have a thorough MR of Latin or haven’t had opportunities to interact in Latin. Worse, there are few published texts for which Novice and Intermediate Latin learners can measure their daily progress in number of books or chapters, rather than lines. This dearth of captivating, level-appropriate texts — not lack of aptitude, motivation, tools, or even skilled instruction — is the number one obstacle confronting anyone trying to learn Latin.
Fortunately, these are practical, not theoretical, problems. There’s nothing about Latin or about the brain that creates these barriers. And hordes of Latin lovers are toppling these barriers for themselves and others. Latin-speaking courses and retreats are multiplying and fill far in advance. The first Latin novellas consciously aligned with Extensive Reading principles appeared in 2015. At a recent conference for modern language teachers, Latin was the third best represented language with 46 participants, just behind French and well ahead of the six or seven trailing languages. Perhaps more impressively, courageous teachers who haven’t yet attended such events are loading their classes with Latin CI, drawing on resources such as those at LIMEN.
This is not about “conversational Latin,” “modern Latin,” or immersion. It’s about the simple fact that humans need vast amounts of suitable input if they are to have any hope of developing a robust MR of a language, and spoken input customized for a learner’s level and interests can’t be beaten for in-class efficiency. I have more than a little fun speaking Latin, but even if I were bored senseless by it, even if I scorned it on principle, even if I found it utterly embarrassing, I would still speak Latin to my students because of the sheer efficiency of hearing comprehensible Latin for the development of MR.
There are alternatives to the MR+Skill framework I’ve presented — feel free to look up Connectionism, Constructivism, and Emergentism — but these, too, emphasize the need for massive amounts of comprehensible input. Debate continues not over the indispensability of CI, but over whether the benefits from CI can or should be supplemented by other means.
It’s worth mentioning to an audience of classicists that no theory of SLA sees Grammar-Translation (GT) as such a means, as GT is not, strictly speaking, a language-teaching method. It is, by design, a method of teaching about language and of training the brain. This is not an insult; it was precisely for its potential to teach about language and train the brain that GT’s popularity boomed in the late 18th century, because without these benefits it was getting hard to justify the continued study of Latin to philistine administrators. Today, teachers and learners need to know that whatever benefits GT may provide come not from Latin, but from the method itself, and do not include the development of MR or linguistic Skill. GT may be appropriate for a course whose goal is not that students know Latin, but that they know about Latin. This is a fine goal, as long as students aren’t receiving foreign language credit and aren’t expected to be able to read Latin in a succeeding course.
What about all the stuff that isn’t part of MR or Skill, but that we or our students’ future teachers or the standardized tests love, stuff like aposiopesis, pythiambics, and two and a half millennia of Latin-using cultures? Depends. Many rhetorical figures, and all meters, are best grasped by being heard. Historical and cultural information, which is worth studying for its own sake and can play a vital role in making texts comprehensible, can be read in students’ native language outside of class or treated in Latin once students’ MR allows. The same goes for the grammar explanations that some learners enjoy. I try to use class time only for things that can’t happen outside my presence. For my students, this mainly means hearing Latin tailored to their level and interests and discussing texts in Latin.
When we create settings and employ practices that take seriously how the human brain naturally processes language, all learners can succeed. It’s no longer about students’ being analytically minded, being skilled or devoted memorizers, having learning preferences supposedly conducive to studying classical languages, or having a knack for languages in general. Communicating through our teaching practices, our materials, or our speech that only such learners will succeed in Latin misrepresents the human brain, language in general, and the Latin language in particular. Let’s not do that.
Although SLA is an empirical science, the practices I’ve described represent humanism at its best, honoring two supremely human things: the Latin language and our students’ minds. If we don’t honor the humanity of these two things, the future of Latin-knowing really will depend on the monomania and fortune of a few. Let’s create circumstances where it depends, instead, simply on the humanness of the language we love and the humanness of the learners we serve.
Justin Slocum Bailey is a linguist by training, a learner by temperament, and a teacher by trade. When he’s not reading something for the thirtieth time or combing the planet for new content in his languages, he operates Indwelling Language, a collection of resources and habits for boosting joy and success in language learning and teaching. He tweets languagy tips and tidbits as @IndwellingLang.
