3 (but I excluded sentences near the end which contained the relative pronoun, which I would treat as a seperate and more difficult topic). Therefore, I tallied up the word order in all the 41 sentences containing an accusative case noun in Ch. I could have chosen almost any.Ĭhapter 3 introduces the accusative case. However, it is far from the only textbook that does this. I chose this because the Krashen crowd likes this book. So now, I’m going to use Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata (LLPSI) as an example of how ‘comprehensible input’ can reinforce an unintended habit. Seeing puella and puellam as variant spellings of the same word does not seem like that big of a deal to a lot of beginner Latin students, if they even registered there was an -m at all. Ifm there’sm one differentm letter sometimesm you can still recognise what word it’s supposed to be, and ignore the extra letter, just like you ignored the extra -m’s in this sentence. You glance at each word and it triggers recognition. When you are reading, you don’t read every single letter in every word. Step back and think how little a change an -m is on the end of puellam.
I don’t need that letter.” And the more SOV sentences they see, the more their reliance on assuming the SOV word order is reinforced. Well I already guessed it was the object – correctly! – without noticing the one letter difference. “Oh, so the second word gets a spelling change. By contrast, a single-letter difference on the end of the second word seems of minor importance. What the student learns experientially from seeing SOV sentence after SOV sentence is that “the first noun I see is the subject, the second noun I see is the object”. That’s all well and good, but the experiential learning is more powerful for the student, and it often overpowers the verbal, abstract, theoretical explanation. I see this all the time when teaching the accusative case to a beginner level class of mixed ability.Ī lot of textbooks, when introducing the accusative, just keep on piling on sentence after sentence in the format of Subject-Object-Verb (SOV):Īs teachers we try to verbally explain that the ending of “puella” changed here, and this is the accusative case and you should pay atttention to it.
The error comes in believing that if a student successfully translates a sentence which happens to contain the target grammar feature, they necessarily understood the target grammar feature. There is sound wisdom in advice as basic as “give them just enough challenge” – that it is what we aim to do in teaching every subject, not just languages. help) until they can do it with the scaffold, then gradually take the scaffold away.” And “if a challenge is too great, give them scaffolding (i.e. This is extremely similar to Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development which can be summarised as “for optimal learning, give a student enough challenge but not too much”.
#LINGUA LATINA PER SE ILLUSTRATA EXTRA PRACTICE PLUS#
Put simply, a learner should be introduced to the each feature of the language incrementally, by receiving input that contains their previous level of competence plus the next feature (i + 1). I’ve been on Latin reddit discussions for years and one single educational theory comes up again and again as if it were the only way to learn a language: Krashen and his comprehensible input hypothesis.