modernizing classical language education: clt and edtech in classical greek

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I. I

NTRODUCTION

A number of years ago, having been astudent in many foreign language class-rooms, I opted to audit a course on Classi-cal Greek. What struck me was the massivedifference in teaching styles between thoseteaching in Modern Languages

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and thosein the Classics Department. At the time, asa student auditing the class, I didn’t reallyanalyze the methodology much; I just wentalong with the teaching style of the profes-sor and used my metalinguistic awarenesswhich I had developed through the studyof other languages, and my familiarity with

Modern Greek, to understand both thegrammar and syntax portions of the class.

Recently, I was given an opportunity toobserve the same course, the course that Itook a number of years ago, and examinethe classroom from a different lens—that ofan applied linguist. Going into this pilotstudy I was interested in analyzing theteaching methodology, wondering if theteaching methodology for the class hadchanged from when I was a student.Having learned a great deal about the vari-ous linguistic factors that go into learninganother language, I was interested inunderstanding whether professionals inthe field of classical language teachingapplied any of this research in secondlanguage acquisition in their own practice.If I found the approaches to be about the

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My previous in-class language learningexperiences included English, French, Italian,German, Russian, Chinese and Japanese.

Apostolos Koutropoulos is a Training Coordinator for the Healey Library at the University of MassachusettsBoston where he instructs students on computer literacy, and consults faculty on pedagogically sound ways ofintegrating technology into the curriculum. He holds a B.A. in Computer Science, an M.B.A. with a focus onHuman Resources, an M.S. in Information Technology, an M.Ed. in Instructional Design, and an M.A. inApplied Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts Boston. His research interests include: knowledgemanagement, educational technology, linguistics, and epistemology.

Modernizing Classical Language EducationCommunicative Language Teaching & Educational

Technology Integration in Classical Greek

Apostolos Koutropoulos

University of Massachusetts Boston––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

[email protected]

Abstract: Classical language education has changed little over the past three decades despiteadvances in academic technology and advances in our understanding of both second languageacquisition and human development. This paper proposes a modification to classical languageteaching and the classical language curriculum based on findings of second language acquisitionresearch, as well as factoring in observational data of students taking an introductory course inAncient Greek.

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ISSN: 1540-5699. © Copyright by Ahead Publishing House (imprint: Okcir Press) and authors. All Rights Reserved.

HUMAN ARCHITECTURE

Journal of the Sociology of Self-

A Publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics)

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same as when I was a student of ClassicalGreek, I would then be interested in apply-ing my knowledge of applied linguistics topropose a reboot of the curriculum. Asecondary goal was to discover who thestudents were and what motivated them tolearn a classical language; last time aroundI didn’t really pay much attention to myfellow students, as I was then focused onmy own education.

1. Learner Analysis

During the fall semester of 2010 Iobserved a typical set of learners in Classi-cal Greek at an urban university in theBoston area over a period of one semester

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.Through my semester-long observation, aswell as a beginning-of-the-semester classsurvey

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, I discovered that the learners inthis classroom were amazingly diverse interms of their educational background. Myinitial assumption was that courses in Clas-sical Greek and Latin would attract mostlystudents whose major is ClassicalLanguages and Literature, while stillattracting a minority of students interestedin the language—much like I was as anundergraduate student. I expected thatstudents in most majors, other than Clas-sics, would opt to take a modern language,like French or German, since those arepresumably the languages that would bemost useful to them in a work or researchenvironment. I was, however, surprised tofind that only a handful of students wereactual Classics majors. Most students in theclass came from both the arts and the

humanities (social work, philosophy,history) and the sciences (biology, psychol-ogy). History could be lumped into the“Classics” category if these students aim tostudy the history of the ancient world andneed to be able to decipher originalsources.

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In terms of other academic back-grounds, about half of the students in thiscourse were juniors, about a quarter weresophomores and about a quarter werefreshmen. My initial predictions, however,had been that most students in the coursewould be freshmen or sophomores major-ing in the Classics. I thought that since thiswas a Greek 101 course, and the knowledgegained in this course would aid thesestudents in future Classics courses wheninteracting with original, authentic materi-als, then they would more likely take thiscourse earlier in their studies. This initialprediction was proven wrong.

Another prediction was based onlinguistic factors. I predicted that manystudents would have had some exposure toa second language, and would have hadsome sort of exposure to Latin, given thanmy initial prediction was that thesestudents would be predominantly Classicsmajors. I also thought that there wouldprobably be a few Greek-Americans look-ing for an “easy A” by taking ClassicalGreek. My initial predictions, as far aslinguistic factors go, were proven correct.Most students did have some exposure to asecond language; there were quite a fewstudents who had studied Latin, there weresome Greek-Americans with some knowl-edge of Modern Greek, and a number ofstudents had studied various Europeanlanguages like French, Spanish, Italian, andGerman, as well as some languages, thatone doesn’t typically find in a high schoolcurriculum in the US, such as Gaelic, Hindi,

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I observed every class session except ses-sions that were set aside for hour-long unit ex-ams. This took place over a 13-week period inthe fall 2010 semester. Each week had three ses-sions; each one being forty-five minutes inlength.

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The survey was designed to capture dataon learners’ previous encounters and familiaritywith other languages, familiarity and usage oftechnology, existing knowledge of the subjectmatter (Ancient Greek), and learners’ expectedfor learning outcomes.

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It would be interesting to conduct furtherresearch as to the motives of studying a classicallanguage by non-Classics majors.

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and Arabic.In terms of technology access and use,

the results were quite interesting. There is atrend in academia to believe that studentshave both access to technology and facilitywith using this technology. This is based onMarc Prensky’s work (2001) with what heterms

Digital Natives

. All students in thiscourse had access to a computer and accessto the Internet. All students also had accessto either a smartphone, or a digital musicplayer. When it came to rating their owncompetence in using computers and theInternet, all of the students rated their skillsat least at the intermediate level of profi-ciency. The status of the learner (freshman,sophomore, or junior) seemed to have a lotto do with how they rated their competencein using

library resources

and

using Black-board

. Students who had been on campuslonger tended to rate their experiencehigher than students who had been oncampus for a shorter time; this was to beexpected. The Web 2.0

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behaviors of thestudents were also quite interesting. Moststudents knew of blogs and microblogs butdidn’t use them. They knew of Facebookand used it frequently; however, they didnot know of, and therefore did not use,dedicated social networks like

del.icio.us

,

Ning

and

Goodreads

. They also did consultwiki pages, but they never contributedknowledge to a wiki. These findings wereclose to my initial hunch about the learners;I believed that they would have

access to

technology, but unlike Prensky (2001) Ibelieved that this didn’t necessarily implythat students were comfortable using it.

The student expectation responses, in

the free-form answer part of the survey,were actually quite interesting to analyze.In the responses there are a few responsesof the “the course will be successful if I getan A” sort, but in responses where studentswent beyond a letter grade you can see adifference between students who had beenapprenticed into the discourse of Classics,and those who had not. The former hadmost likely taken Latin and their rubric fora successful class is to be able to read theGreek and to translate it into English.

Individuals who have not been appren-ticed into the discourse of Classics expect tobe able to speak Classical Greek withfriends and family, gain an understandingof English based on Greek roots andlemmas or learn about their background. Itis interesting that students who have beenapprenticed into the discourse expect to beable to memorize a lot, and use that forreading, while those who have

not

beenapprenticed into the discourse of Classicsexpect cultural background information,and to gain competence in speech as well asreading—something you tend to see in thediscourse of foreign language teaching, notin classical language teaching. What isinteresting to note is that about half of thestudents dropped the course during theuniversity’s add-drop period

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, and most ofthe students who remained were Classicsmajors.

2. Current Teaching Methodology

Having observed a seasoned, andtalented, faculty member teach ClassicalGreek

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for one semester, I can say with ahigh degree of confidence that theapproach used to teach the course is the

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Web 2.0 is a term that describes applica-tions on the World Wide Web that facilitate par-ticipatory information sharing andcollaboration amongst the users of those webapplications. The user-centered design of Web2.0 web applications encourages dialogue anduser-created content. It is commonly believedthat members of the “Digital Native” generation(born after 1980) are avid and expert users ofWeb 2.0 technologies.

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According to the instructor it is normal tostart a class with a full set of students, and forabout half to drop it throughout the semester. Itwould be interesting, in a future study, to seehow this compares to other Classical and Mod-ern languages and to determine what makesstudents stay or drop the course.

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th

century B.C.E. Attic Greek to be exact.

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Grammar Translation approach; this wasthe same approach used when I took Clas-sical Greek a number of years ago. TheGrammar Translation approach alsoappears to be favored by many Classiciststeaching Greek and Latin (Lafleur, 1998).The Grammar Translation method, alsoknown as the Prussian Method in the US(Richards & Rodgers, 2001), is interesting inthat it is a method with no theory; there isno literature that offers a rationale or justi-fication for using it, or that attempts torelate it to issues in linguistics, educationaltheory or psychology (Richards & Rodgers,2001). Focusing on forms seems to me to bemore of a psychological need to

build up to

the level where students are consideredable to read on their own; this

building up to

entails a focus on, and mastery of, thegrammar before students are consideredready to tackle authentic texts.

The primary goal of the GrammarTranslation approach is for students tostudy a language in order to read its litera-ture, or benefit from the mental disciplineand intellectual development resultingfrom the study of another language. Thetarget language is first approached thougha detailed analysis of the language’s gram-mar rules, followed by application of thisknowledge to the task of translatingsentences and texts into and out of thetarget language (Richards & Rodgers,2001). I can think of numerous examples ofthis in both my original experience as alearner of Classical Greek and as anobserver of a class of students learningClassical Greek during the fall 2010 semes-ter. The average learning module beginswith a thorough explanation of the gram-matical topic at hand, followed by practicedrills, and ultimately culminating in trans-lating sentences from Greek to English andEnglish to Greek

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. A considerable amount

of class time was spent going over the drillsthat students had done for homework.

The Grammar Translation methodviews language teaching as consisting oflittle more than memorizing rules and factsin order to understand and manipulate themorphology and syntax of the targetlanguage (Richards & Rodgers, 2001). Thiswas also something that was seen in myobservations of the Classical Greek coursein the fall 2010 semester. Even though theinstruction observed wasn’t purely Gram-mar Translation, the instructor did mentionthat students could be helped if theymemorized groupings of things—like, forexample, a verb’s principal parts. I inter-preted this as that memorization was high-lighted as a major learning strategy on thepart of the learner. There were, throughoutthe course, a number of interesting discus-sions tying in history, sociology, and sociol-inguistic factors in language use, as far asClassical Greek was concerned; howeverthese were few and far in between whencompared to the frequency of drills andform pattern practice and they oftenhappened in conversations betweenstudents and the instructor before and afterclass and they were not part of the formalcurriculum.

The Grammar Translation method cancause frustration in students (Richards &Rodgers, 2001), and I did notice somegrammar frustration in the course,although frustration seemed to be miti-gated by how metalinguistically developedthe students were. It seemed that studentswho had some language education in theirbackground were better able to deal withthis language teaching approach, andperhaps these students used previouslyacquired schemata (Carell & Eisterhold,1988) to process new forms of a differenttarget language. Even those students,however, had issues with the way theinstructional approach dealt withcontent—that is having a syllabus that isorganized by grammar points and focusing

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Translation exercises in my recent coursetended to have more items from Greek to En-glish, than the English to Greek.

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on sentence level translation (Richards &Rodgers, 2001).

As the semester progressed, evenstudents with a somewhat developedmetalinguistic awareness expressed prob-lems with “remembering” all the formsbecause they tended to not use all of them.They worked on a specific form until theirpractice culminated to a test of their knowl-edge, and then they moved to anothergrammatical topic that made little explicitconnection to items learned in previouslessons. Even though language is cumula-tive in nature and you cannot move on tothe next steps without using

some

of therules that you have learned before, thestudent comments seemed to imply that

they felt they were not doing more with thelanguage that necessitated going back to previ-ously learned materials and thus having moreopportunities to practice

.Finally, the role of the instructor in a

Grammar Translation approach tolanguage learning is what Lee & VanPatten(2003) call an “Atlas.” The instructor is themain speaker and presenter of informationin the class. The model is fundamentallyone where the teacher is essentially abroadcaster of information and thestudents are receivers of this information.The instructor in my course did engagestudents and tried to get more of thestudents involved as the semester wasunderway, mostly by trying to access theirprior knowledge and having them try toconnect their previous knowledge of Greek(acquired earlier on in the semester) towhat they were learning later on. It seemsto me that the students, at that point in thesemester, were used to the “broadcast”method, a pace which was set earlier in thesemester, and it was not as easy to urgethem to contribute later on in the semestersince the tone was already set. I also believethat part of the students’ reluctance tospeak may have been affective in that theymay have felt comfortable with under-standing the individual parts of the

sentence, but not necessarily comfortablewith deciphering the meaning of the wholesentence.

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The current approach to teaching Clas-sical Greek has certain shortcomings: 1) It isnot based on any linguistic, educational orpsychological theory of learning; 2) it isfocused on reading and writing with littleor no systematic attention paid to speakingor listening; and 3) it can cause frustrationfor learners, especially those that are not asmetalinguistically aware as more“advanced” language learners. It seemsclear, therefore, that a new approach isnecessary if we are to truly educate ourlearners in the Classics. This revampedapproach not only has the potential to helpClassics majors, but it can potentially makeClassics more approachable to non-majors,thus piquing the interest of more studentsand bringing more people into the field.

The methodology proposed here isbased on the principles of CommunicativeLanguage Teaching.

1. Teaching Methodology

Communicative Language Teaching(CLT) is borne out of the need to focus oncommunicative proficiency in languageteaching rather than a mere mastery ofstructures (Richards & Rodgers, 2001). TheCLT approach aims to make communica-tive competence the goal of language teach-ing and to develop procedures for teachingthe four language skills (reading, writing,speaking, and listening) that acknowledgethe interdependence of language andcommunication. Communicative compe-tence (Hymes, 1972 in Richards & Rodgers,2001) is defined as what the speaker needsto know in order to be able communicate ina speech community; this requires both

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knowledge and the ability to use languagewith respect to what is possible, feasible,and appropriate in a language, and knowl-edge as to whether something (a particularexpression or grammatical construction forinstance) is indeed done.

Canale & Swain (1980, in Richards &Rodgers, 2001) further expand this defini-tion to include four subcomponents: (1)Grammatical competence, which is essen-tially Hymes’ “what is possible”; (2) Socio-linguistic competence, i.e., theunderstanding of roles relationships andthe shared information of the participantsand the communicative purpose of theinteraction; (3) Discourse competence, thatis, the interpretation of individual messageelements in terms of their interconnected-ness and how meaning is represented inrelationship to the discourse of the text; and(4) Strategic competence, which is aboutcoping strategies that communicators useto initiate, terminate, maintain, repair andredirect communication. All of these areimportant in modern languages, but theyare important in classical languages as well.Focusing on solely grammatical formmeans that, at best, you are ignoring threeout of four competencies that learners arerequired to have to be competent users of alanguage.

When one mentions “communication”as the focus of anything, the immediatemental image generated by the personlistening to you is that of speech. Perhapsthis is the case because

all

languages arespoken, but not all languages are written;as a matter of fact

most

of the world’slanguages exist in only spoken form(Lewis, 2009). Communication, however, is

not just

in speech. Communication exists inthe written texts of ancient authors that wewant to study; these authors are communi-cating with us through their writings.Granted, this communication is

one way

butwe do have methods of interacting with thetext to get to the underlying meaning—viewing what ancient writers wrote

through the prism of that ancient cultureand not through our own

modern

biases. Iwould submit that the acts of reading andattempting to understand

are willful acts ofcommunication on the part of both the readerand the writer

.John Firth, a British applied linguist,

stressed that language needs to be studiedin the broader sociocultural context of itsuse, which included participants, theirbehavior, beliefs, the objects of linguisticdiscussion and word choice (Wardhaugh,2009); thus communication does existoutside of language. Art for example is amedium for communication. Everydayobjects are also acts of communication. Forthis reason, an approach to teaching Classi-cal languages should include culturallyauthentic realia in the process of teachinglanguage. Little et al. (1989, in Mishan,2005), describe culturally authentic realiaas objects that are created to fulfill somesocial purpose within a social context of thelanguage community in which they arefound. Written language, and written texts,also don’t exist in a vacuum. They are influ-enced both by spoken language and by thetime and society in which the languagedeveloped. For this reason it is important totreat classical languages as spokenlanguages as well, so that we may betterunderstand the context in which they werespoken. Epic poems like The Odyssey wereoriginally spoken. Plays were written to beperformed; as such they would be a goodsource to get us to think more about how theancients spoke, what they spoke about andin what contexts. Works meant for publicperformance can tell us a lot about thesocial climate at the time and a city’sWeltanschauung. One of the most character-istic features of CLT is that it pays system-atic attention to function, as well asstructural aspects of language (Littlewood,1981, in Richards & Rodgers, 2001), byexploring the spoken language, in additionto the written language; we are better ableto understand how the language was used,

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which in turn helps us better understandwhat we are reading in those classicalworks.

Luckily for us, the ancient Greeks haveleft behind statues, coins, vases, architec-ture and more things that we can use tointegrate culture into the language learningcurriculum. It is important to exploreculture as an integrated part of languagelearning because, as Bernstein (in Ward-haugh, 2009) puts it, there is a cyclical rela-tionship between language and culture:language influences culture, and in turnculture influences language. You cannothope to fully understand an ancient textwithout knowing the cultural context inwhich events took place.

With communication, and not morpho-logical forms, as the focus, learners canexcel in the task of learning a Classicallanguage. As Savignon (1972, in Lee &VanPatten, 2003) writes, in her study shefound that people learn to communicate bypracticing communication. In her study,groups, with different learning styles,learning French, were more successful inlearning the language using the CLTapproach than the audiolingual method9. Ifyou are learning to use a tool (in this caselanguage) with an end-goal in mind, andyou are making progress toward that endgoal while learning to use the tool, you aremuch more successful in your task of learn-ing the tool since you can see an immedi-ately demonstrable purpose. The notion ofdirect, rather than delayed, practice ofcommunicative acts is central to most CLTinterpretations (Richards & Rodgers, 2001).

This de-emphasis on forms, however,brings questions like “don’t you need tofirst gain mastery of grammatical skillsbefore you can apply them?” Generallythese “grammatical skills” are an allusionto morphological elements like tense conju-

gations and noun inflections. Savignon(1983, in Richards & Rodgers, 2001) rejectsthe notion that learners must first gaincontrol over individual skills such aspronunciation, grammar, and vocabularybefore applying them in communicativetasks; she instead advocates providingcommunicative practice from the start ofinstruction.

The CLT environment is learner-centered. This is a departure from theteacher-centered Grammar Translationclassroom. The instructor is no longer, whatLee & VanPatten (2003) term, an “Atlas.”The instructor’s role changes from a broad-caster of information, commonly referredto in academia as “the sage on the stage,” tothat of a facilitator of the communicationsprocess, and an independent participant inthe learning-teaching group. The CLTapproach also stresses a cooperativeapproach to learning. This may cause someconfusion or resentment on the part of thelearner because learners do bring theirpreconceptions with what language learn-ing looks like into the classroom and theymay be expecting a sage on the stage to justdownload all the information aboutlanguage that they need into their minds(Richards & Rodgers, 2001). In addition, inorder to teach language, we don’t simplyneed grammarians, we need capablesubject matter experts of the ancient world.The instructors teaching Classicallanguages are experts in the ClassicalWorld, so the question is why do we stillrelegate them to just being grammarians?Through CLT the totality of their skills canbe used for the benefit of the learner.

2. Technology Integration

Using technology to improve andenhance language teaching and learning isnot a new idea in the Classics field (LaFleur,1998; McManus, 2001; McManus & Rubino2003; Reinhard, 2009). The question thenbecomes how does one best utilize both

9 The Audiolingual Method, aka “ArmyMethod,” comes after Grammar Translation andis based on a behaviorist methodology utilizinga lot of drills to form correct habits.

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general information technology and educa-tional technology available to enhance ourlearning outcomes? In years past there wasa special problem with using educationalIT for teaching Greek given that it uses anon-Latin alphabet. This caused specialproblems for the creation of materials aswell as student work. With the advent ofUnicode character sets, all computerscreated within the past eight years nowhave the capacity to display and produceGreek characters and accents without anyspecial software. This wide availabilitymakes the job of the instructor easier toimplement exercises using educationaltechnology to enhance their curriculum.

With this wide availability comes aquestion on just how to use the technologyto improve the curriculum. Through theuse of the Grammar Translation methodol-ogy, the pitfall is that we use it for “hyper-ote,” that is, just doing the same old thingthat students are doing in paper and pencilform now—memorizing forms and fillingout grammar tables (Hill, 2003). This use oftechnology for effective teaching and learn-ing is largely a failure, as it is reproducing aform that already exists, and doesn’t workvery well! With the advent of “social”media, technologies such as blogs, wikis,podcasts, and free video hosting, such asYouTube, we now have many tools on ourpalette to create an educational solutionthat coincide with the theoretical underpin-nings of our methodology, CLT—ones thatcoincide with the technical level of compe-tence of our learners.

Perseus

When Classicists, and Humanists ingeneral, think of a major computerizedresource for resources dealing with theclassical Greek and Roman world theythink of the Perseus Project. The PerseusProject isn’t a new kid on the block. Theproject started in 1985 and it covers thehistory, literature and culture of the Greco-

Roman world (Crane, 2010). In its collec-tion one can find works by ancient Greekand Roman authors, as well as some visualmaterial of art and architecture. In addi-tion, there are great tools for textual analy-sis and vocabulary help. Depending on thelevel of the learner and on the activity, thistool can be used sparingly or extensively.

The idea for using Perseus as a peda-gogical tool is also not a new one (Crane &Mylonas, 1988; Marchionni & Crane, 1994).The design of Perseus is compatible withour view of language learning, namely thatwe are looking at primary sources, andculturally authentic realia; as opposed tohaving a filtered view of these itemsthrough some textbook or “expert.” Thedesigners of Perseus “view knowledge as aprocess and flow of relationships ratherthan as compartmentalized and discreetconcepts” (Marchionni & Crane, 1994). Thisconnectivist view of knowledge and learn-ing coincides with our methodology forlanguage learning where the teacher is nolonger the atlas, but a participant in co-constructing knowledge.

Using Perseus, early learners can, forexample, use the word lookup tool to figureout what unknown words mean whilemore advanced learners could go to theoriginal texts and do searches to spot trendsin language use within an author’s works,or examine language use among multipleauthors (Marchionni & Crane, 1994).Knowing what a student’s current level oftechnological knowledge is in a 101 coursecan help instructors tailor the use ofPerseus for their class, and as studentsprogress to more advanced languageclasses the instructor can incorporate tech-nology literacy into their curriculum so thatstudents become more sophisticated usersof the technology.

Learning Communities

The central organizing principle forour educational technology use revolves



around the use of technology that facilitatesa revamped Classics classroom, a class-room conceived as a community of prac-tice. Communities of practice “are formedby people who engage in a process ofcollective learning in a shared domain ofhuman endeavor” (Wegner, 1998).Communities of practice are about jointpractice, shared repertoire and mutualengagement (Wegner, 2006). Communitiesof practice are thus compatible with ourVygotskian view of knowledge and humanlearning using the CLT approach—ourclassroom thus is a community of practice.

Since our class only meets three timesper week, it is worthwhile extending ourimplicit in-class community of practice toone that is assisted through technologymediation and thus enables learners andfacilitators to meet, interact and sociallyconstruct knowledge when the class is notofficially in session (Koutropoulos, 2010).These days there are many tools to enableus to create such online communities; andthe tool of preference for educators appearsto be a service called Ning (Reinhard, 2009;Koutropoulos, 2010; Sorenos, 2010).

A Ning community can bring togethernovice learners, learners just starting theirlearning of Classical Greek, and more expe-rienced learners, such as learners in upperlevel undergraduate courses and graduatelevel courses, for mutual learning, andresource sharing, as well as social engage-ments. Through the use of a Ning commu-nity as central jumping off point we canalso use other Web 2.0 technologies such aswikis, blogs and audiovisual means likepodcasts and videos on YouTube.

Wikis

A wiki can be characterized as awebsite that can be accessed and edited bymany people, giving them the ability tocollaborate and co-construct knowledge.Wikis in language learning hold “a poten-tial for collectively producing, organizing

and sustaining textual (and, increasingly,visual and auditory) resources” (Lund,2008). Depending on the language level ofthe learner wikis could be used as a tool tosupplement others tools. For example, theuse and analysis of language corpora (Kalt-enböck & Mehlmauer-Larcher, 2005; Braun,2005; Braun, 2007) have been shown to helpwith language acquisition. Wikis could beused to collectively organize knowledgegained through the use of such corpora,along with drawing upon relevant exam-ples form these sources.

Since we don’t want to cut out gram-mar instruction completely from ourcurriculum because it is an important partof language competence (Larsen-Freeman,1997; Richards & Rogers, 2001), we coulduse an exercise where students developtheir own grammatical definitions (Lloyd,2005) and use a wiki to take a solitary activ-ity and transform it into one wherestudents collaborate with each other, withguidance from the instructor, in order tocome up with definitions of grammar thatare factual and make sense to them. Sincegrammar is essentially hypertext (Beau-doin, 2004)—a web of rules which areconnected and dependent on oneanother—instead of having grammar ruleshanded down from instructor, or textbook,like laws coming down from mount Sinai,these rules can be co-constructed with thehelp of the instructor. This gives students asense of ownership in the process and theoutcome, instead of being outside of theprocess and just memorizing rulesprovided by someone else—wikis can be aninstrument which enables this collabora-tion outside the classroom.

Blogs & Microblogs

With an acknowledgement of theimportance of culturally authentic materi-als (Kramsch, 1993, 2000), blogs andmicroblogs have been invaluable resourcesin the modern language classroom. We can



see many uses of these services in recentresearch (Murray & Hourigan, 2008; Borauet al., 2009; Scinicariello, 2010; Byrne, 2010;)such as getting news from the targetlanguage country, seeing what speakers ofthe language are saying, and gettingauthentic language use in context. Withclassical languages we cannot exactlyfollow the same approach considering thefact that there are no ancient Greeks on theInternet blogging and tweeting about theirdaily lives; thus blogs and microblogs (liketwitter) aren’t a sources for authentic inputand we must use them in a slightly differ-ent fashion than they are in modernlanguages.

At all levels of language learning blogscan also be used as a means to provide boththe learner and the instructor with a barom-eter to gauge how the language learningprocess is going. Learners could use a blog,as was originally intended, as a journal totrack their progress, their successes andtheir frustrations. This can help the instruc-tor with modifying the class as needed andwith providing additional or alternateresources to help the student with theirlanguage learning goals. Depending on theclass, microblogs can be used as a way toget students into the role of a protagonist ina work that they are reading. For example ifthere is a course devoted to the Iliad,students can take the role of Helen, Odys-seus, Paris (and others) and tweet, in Greek,as if they were them—thus providing somesort of insight into how students are inter-preting that character through Homer’swritings.

Audio & Video

One of the innovations of the broader(online) Classical Greek learning commu-nity (Sorenos, 2010) is their use of audiovi-sual means for learning the language andinteracting in it! In modern languages wesee many examples of research (Oxford,2009; Dukate & Lomicka, 2009; Abdous et

al., 2009) where researchers are looking atthe effects of computer mediated commu-nication and interaction on learning andusing the language. In classical languages,mostly due to the reliance on the GrammarTranslation method, we do not see the useof video as a way to enhance learning in theclassroom.

One example, used in the [Schole]community (Sorenos, 2010), is the use ofvideo-grams sent from member to memberas a means of communicating. While this isa novel use of the technology and mimicstechniques used in modern languagesclassrooms, the environment is ripe forcoming up with new uses of video to teachClassics.

III. POTENTIAL HURDLES

No change is without some potentialhurdles to overcome. One of the mainhurdles that I foresee is that this change inhow classical languages are taught needs tobe implemented throughout the curricu-lum in order for it to be effective. It wouldbe really unfortunate if students in Greek101 were taught using this methodology,only to be going back to a Grammar Trans-lation model with Greek 102. When imple-menting such a change not only do allfaculty need to be on-board, but the curric-ulum needs to be redesigned in order toaccommodate the new methodology. Forinstance, one may be able to cram all of theClassical Greek grammar in four semestersusing the Grammar Translation approach,but when a more communicative method isemployed, more time will be taken up formeaningful communication drills thanmorpheme manipulation drills; this meansthat perhaps fifth and sixth semester Greekcourses need to be implemented in addi-tion to reworking the four existing courses.

The second sticky point might be theactual pronunciation of Greek. This is atopic that is beyond the scope of this paper,



but as we can see through a cursory look atresearch and commentary on the issue(Snow, 1890; Allen, 1987; Caragounis, 1995;Dillon, 2001; Daitz, 2002), scholars disagreeon what classical Greek sounded like andwhat we should be teaching in school. The[Schole] community (Sorenos, 2010) tacklesthis by asking members what pronuncia-tion the member uses when she or hespeaks. If learners know of some of thepossibilities, they may be able to communi-cate with others even when they are usingdifferent pronunciations. The analogy tothis can be seen in modern day Englishwhere there are many potential pronuncia-tions for the same language. Schoolsaround the world teaching ESL teach alldifferent kinds of pronunciation but this10

doesn’t necessarily impede learners. Learn-ers who are aware of the differences inpronunciation can cope with the same writ-ten words sounding different dependingon the speaker’s preferred pronunciation.Ancient Greek shouldn’t be any different.My recommendation, to keep thingssimple, is that the department ought toadopt a pronunciation and have faculty useit throughout the curriculum. Whether oneuses the Restored pronunciation, theModern, the Pontic, or the pronunciation ofthe recently discovered Romeyka, dialect ofGreek (Kathimerini, 2010), the importantthing is to pick one and use it throughoutthe curriculum because it will be used as avehicle for communication.

A third sticky point is the question ofwhether or not we really need to speak thelanguage in order to learn it. In ModernLanguages it seems like a silly propositionto not speak the language, so why is it sowith Classical Languages? All discussions

about “what is communication” aside, acompelling reason for choosing to speakthe language comes from Swain’s Compre-hensible Output Hypothesis (Swain 1985 &1995, in Mitchell &Myles, 2004). Swainargues that when we read texts (which iswhat Classical Language Learning hasbeen geared toward) we only partlyprocess those foreign language texts. Inorder to drive forward the learner’slinguistic development, that learner needsto produce language. In her ComprehensibleOutput Hypothesis she states that whenlearners produce language they noticewhen they don’t know something they aretrying to express; and they hypothesize andtest language structures. If the message thatthe learner tries to convey is received, butnot understood, this, in theory, pushes thelearner to prod at their own learning andhelp them along their linguistic develop-ment. If the message conveyed is grammat-ically wrong, and therefore notcomprehensible, the learner will have toreformulate to correct the grammar of theirutterance in order to make it comprehensi-ble to the hearer. If the utterance is correct,but it is not understood because of someother factor, the speaker-learner will haveto rephrase his or her utterance so that theact of communication can continue. Havingstudents perform these communicativeexchanges in real-time, through speaking,gives students an opportunity to think inthe language they are learning in smallerchunks of information, as opposed tomerely passively translating sentences andpassages from Ancient Greek to an Englishthat students don’t necessarily connectwith in their own lives.

The last hurdle to tackle are theassumptions from students themselves. Ifstudents have taken Latin, or Greek before,they’ve surely been exposed to the Gram-mar Translation method. They may alsothrive in it because they’ve learned to learnwith that method. For instance, we see thatin some studies (Braun, 2007) students

10 An example to this is my own personalexperience in (re)learning English. When I waslearning English in Greece, the pronunciationused by instructors and fellow students was Re-ceived Pronunciation. When I was in highschool in the US, the pronunciation in my ESLclasses was what may be thought of as “generic”or “news anchor” American.



were expecting grammar rules to be explic-itly taught. Even though post-instructiontests showed that the group that receivednon-explicit grammar training performedas well as the group that had explicit gram-mar training, in a post-experiment ques-tionnaire the students claimed that nogrammar had been learned because nogrammar rules had been explicitly taught—i.e., the student assumption was thatlanguage learning implies explicit knowl-edge of rules. Knowing that this may be apossibility, it is important for the instruc-tors undertaking this to let the learnersknow of the learning process in thesecourses.

IV. CONCLUSION

The current approach to teaching clas-sical languages is the Grammar Translationapproach, an approach which is hit-or-missbecause it is not founded on any particulartheoretical underpinnings and it viewslanguage in a technocratic, grammarcentric, approach. Switching to theCommunicative Language Teachingapproach for the teaching of classicallanguages affords us the ability to uselanguage in its totality, not just for readingclassical works, but also interacting withthose works and using all four dimensionsof language (reading, writing, speakingand listening) to improve the acquisition ofthe language. In addition, there is a focusshift, from a teacher-centric focus in theGrammar Translation method, to a learner-centric focus with CLT.

It is important to caution languageteachers to not fall, as some have (Kárpáti,2009; Oxford, 2009), for the myth of the“digital native.” Just because a certaingeneration has grown up around technol-ogy and information, this does not meanthat these students know how to use thistechnology or take advantage of it foreducational purposes, as our survey of

students this semester has shown. VariousWeb 2.0 technology are great tools to use inour language teaching endeavor, but weshould make sure that our learners can usethese tools before they have to use them forclassroom purposes.Technology can beused to enhance the teaching and learningof classical languages, now more than ever.With the wide use of Unicode fonts allow-ing for Greek to be typed and viewed onthe World Wide Web, learners no longerhave to be focused solely on text-basedmaterials and written interactions withpeers. Web 2.0 technologies, on the otherhand, have moved the Internet from abroadcast model, a corollary to Lee &VanPatten’s (2003) “atlas” languageteacher, to a model that allows of interac-tion among peers. This facilitates thecommunication and the social constructionof knowledge in the language classroom.

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modernizing classical language education: clt and edtech in classical greek

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