My interest in undertaking a study relating to Classics and issues of diversity in the classroom is the result of several personal and circumstantial approaches to the subject, which have become more pronounced in my mind since the start of my Postgraduate Certificate of Education at the University of Cambridge.

This therefore suggests that the Year 11 class will not concur with studies to suggest that choice provides students with the motivation to achieve, rather that the boys are more likely to obstruct their learning by choosing the easier choice of task. The second class is a Year 9 Latin class, and there is a lower percentage of mixed-ability students in this class. Owing to this, the class will, I hope, further demonstrate whether choice in the classroom is linked to motivation and high performance. The reason why I have chosen two different classes and subjects is because, generally, the atmosphere in the classes and the preparation of lessons in each are very different from each other. It will therefore be worthwhile to determine how choice theory works in both instances.

For countless students of Latin (myself included), prevailing memories of Latin instruction involve being taught to unpick Latin sentences by racing towards the verb and securing the meaning of the main clause before piecing together the rest. However, this ‘hunt the verb’ approach, where one's eyes are jumping back and forth in search of the resolution of ambiguity, is not necessarily conducive to fluent reading of Latin (Hoyos, 1993). If, as so many textbooks and teachers vouch, we are aiming to unlock Roman authors for all students to read, then we need to furnish them with the skills to be able to read Latin fluently, automatically and with enjoyment, not engender in them a process more akin to puzzle-breaking. I chose to experiment with teaching students to read Latin in order, firstly because, as Markus and Ross (2004) point out, the Romans themselves must necessarily have been able to understand Latin in the order in which it was composed as so much of their sharing of literature happened orally. Indeed, as Kuhner (2016) and others who promote the continuation of spoken Latin have argued, this is still a very real possibility today. And secondly, because it is a skill which I, and others, believe to be teachable (Hansen, 1999; Markus & Ross, 2004; Hoyos, 2006; McCaffrey, 2009). Not only that, but whatever our starting point, Wegenhart (2015) believes that by encouraging these reading skills early, we can encourage our students to be ‘expert’ readers who will be able to enjoy reading Latin long after they have been through their exams.

In our present times Languages and Humanities seem to be neglected in lieu of Science and Technology courses, and both teachers and parents redirect students towards courses that are said to make them more employable. This utilitarian view of education does not always provide the expected results and, in the short to medium term, ends up having nefarious consequences in the way humanity sees itself and how it supports humanist values. Whenever we ignore our past and look at it as if it were something useless and without relevance, we end up being, in a sense, overwhelmed with an admirable but ephemeral new world, where everything is illusory and without support. It is in this respect that the teaching of Latin in Portugal, as has been the case in other European countries, has been relegated to the old and the outdated, supposedly without any practical usefulness.

This research project seeks to examine, using approaches drawn from a case study, how oral storytelling within the classroom can influence various aspects of narrative writing. Therefore, certain teaching strategies and oral activities were implemented in a sequence of lessons which aimed to develop the style and content base of students’ narrative writing.

My experiences both as a learner and as a teacher of Latin have led me to the conviction that speaking Latin advances a more nuanced understanding of the language, and leads to an enhanced level of reading fluency and greater ease in engaging closely with the text. Even after having studied the language to any degree of competence in a passive capacity, bringing it into active use does not come without some investment of time and effort. With the intention of facilitating access to the benefits of speaking Latin fluently, I have set out some recommendations for those who would like to explore this approach, and put together an overview of its recent spread in formal teaching, and in research, around the UK and Europe. It is my hope that in drawing attention to the rapidly increasing number of initiatives, this article will promote cross-fertilisation of ideas between the disparate influencers in the field of Latin pedagogy.

‘Anyone can teach Latin, while teaching Greek is hard’. ‘Introductory language courses are easier to teach than intermediate/text-based courses’. These are views that the author of this article has heard voiced in Classics departments on both sides of the Atlantic. They reflect underlying assumptions about language teaching that often have very practical effects on who is assigned what kinds of teaching, and how those instructors approach their task.

Readers would do well to keep in mind at all times the following distinctions when reading this article: standard/classical and non-standard; native and non-native speaker; literate and illiterate. I use ‘second’ and ‘foreign’ interchangeably of a language, as any distinction that may be made is not relevant in the context of a world in which there were no nation-states (or notions of political correctness). If I were to prefer one to the other it would be ‘foreign’: native speakers of Latin regarded everyone else but Greek-speakers as foreigners, or, as they called them, barbari. The foreigners came to have a higher regard for Latin than the native speakers of Latin had for their languages; but unlike the British in more recent times the latter never sought to impose their language on the former, nor even to encourage its adoption by them.

Despite the challenges which are involved, some secondary schools show determination to get Classics onto the timetable and into their curricular provision. The following three case studies draw on interviews with the people directly involved in doing so: the Principals and the teachers themselves. These experiences were captured at the time when they were getting Classics into their schools. The first is derived from an interview with a qualified specialist Classics teacher, ‘Rachel’, working in London. Latin already had a presence there from when the school had employed a part-time teacher; the remit was the development of a full Classics department. The second is based on interviews with the school head teacher and a non-specialist Modern Languages teacher ‘Yvonne’ who had been employed to start a Classics department from scratch in a school in the Midlands. The third is based on an interview with the Principal of an academy which had decided to introduce Latin not only into her own school with a new teacher ‘George’, but also into one that was not yet built. The respondents’ real names have, of course, been changed.