Latin 003: Intermediate Latin
Latin 003 and Technology
As a course I taught in the traditional classroom, and as a "dead" language, the types of technology I used in Latin 003 were significantly different from those I use in my online courses, or from those I use in literature classes. In this way, Latin 003 was more technologically basic. I used PowerPoint presentations for grammar lessons (see the screen shot at right for a sample page from one of my Latin 003 lectures), and I made extensive use of ANGEL (Penn State's Course Management System, not unlike "Blackboard"). ANGEL was a useful resource for me and my students, as I was able to post my lecture files (several examples of which are on this page), to provide links to online resources, to post self-grading review quizzes, and to keep track of attendance, which is so important to a language course.
Latin 003: Resuscitating a Language
One of the greatest challenges when teaching a "dead" language is communicating the relevance of the course material. The easiest way to do this, of course, is to focus on English vocabulary building and to highlight the influence Roman cultural production has had on our own culture. To take this task even further, I designed a variety of assignments and tasks for my students to encourage them to find the relevance of, say, Cicero, for themselves. Of course I guided them in these tasks, but Latin 003 is an intermediate language course. The next Latin course these students will take is, likely, a literature or prose composition class. To effectively prepare my students for the challenges of reading Ovid, Livy, or Virgil in Latin, I needed to make them self-sufficient in their Latin literacy.
To foment this self-sufficiency and good study habits for the next level of Latin, I asked my students to engage with our primary text, Cicero's First Catilinarian Oration, in ways they had never done before in Latin. Students wrote a variety of directed essays on short passages of Cicero, analyzing the orator's use of images, grammatical structures, and rhetorical devices. Students were thus engaging the text in a uncomfortable way, but a way that would become the norm as they continued their study of the language. I received a great deal of positive feedback from students, who told me that for the first time they felt that they were using Latin in a way that mattered. I also had my students do a lot of group work. Group translations, group analyses, and group presentations on topics related to our grammar lessons and to Cicero's text.
As a former high school Latin teacher, I had to adapt my language teaching style for my university audience, but teaching Latin to students in the seventh through twelfth grades did give me a large portfolio of tools, handouts, and approaches to bring a "dead" language back to life. Latin instructors must do exactly this to excite students, be they 14 or 21 years old.
The image above is a screen shot from ANGEL, showing the main content page for Latin 003. This page provided students with folders containing PowerPoint lectures for download, their written assignments, and other learning tools, including a quiz to assess their level of Latin at the start of the term.
Screen shot example of a PowerPoint lesson on Clauses of Result. I have found that one of the best uses of PowerPoint in a language course is the ability to hide translations of sample sentences until I wish to reveal them. This page has some sentences revealed, and others yet to be shown.
