Abstract
As a Latin teacher, I think a lot about reading. Without texts I would not have a subject to teach, and the goal of many Latin programs (including my own) is teaching students to read Latin texts. I began my Latin teaching career while teaching the language to myself as well. The goal (both for myself and my students) was to read Latin confidently and fluidly, from left to right, processing the meaning of the words as my eye scanned the pages. Yet my good intentions were soon frustrated, and I was baffled by a problem which I soon realised was not unique to my situation: despite years of training, neither I nor my students could read Latin in a natural, fluid way. Furthermore, textbooks and colleagues seemed resigned to the view that such a goal was unrealistic or unobtainable. Best to treat language as a puzzle to be solved, or linguistic knot to be untangled, rather than a language expressing a message. Only the most intellectually gifted students continued in my ‘puzzle-solving’ course; consequently, my enrolment dropped off steeply after the second year. Looking for more help, I even implemented various ‘rules for reading’ and ‘reading strategies’ advocated by others, yet rather than improve student reading ability, I felt my curriculum begin to feel increasingly cluttered with activities and processes that stole away from my students the valuable time needed to interact with the language itself. It was not until I began investigating the field of Second Language Acquisition (hereafter SLA) that I discovered some simple, yet fundamental principles about language that helped explain my students’ struggles and helped me rethink language teaching in general.
Highlights
Two ReadersTwo primary difficulties present in any discussion about reading in any language (classical or modern) are that (1) reading is a complex series of conscious and subconscious processes (Krashen, 2004) and (2) there exist many types of and uses for reading (Grabe, 2009)
Imagine two students reading the same text
Extensive reading is reading with a focus on comprehension of a message
Summary
Two primary difficulties present in any discussion about reading in any language (classical or modern) are that (1) reading is a complex series of conscious and subconscious processes (Krashen, 2004) and (2) there exist many types of and uses for reading (Grabe, 2009). Palmer, who first coined the terms intensive and extensive reading, described intensive reading as slowly studying the language and expressions of a text ‘referring at every moment to our dictionary and our grammar, comparing, analysing, translating, and retaining every expression that it contains’ (Palmer, 1921/1964). This reading process likely sounds familiar to anyone who has studied a classical language. By engaging in the act of listening to or reading messages that the student can understand, the student gradually develops an implicit understanding and fluency in the language, that allows them to interpret increasingly complex messages, as well as begin to communicate messages of their own
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