This study took place in a Year 7 class in a selective mixed independent school and examines the use of learning strategies for Latin vocabulary. The students were asked how they normally learn vocabulary, and these results using their normal method are compared to the results of using three different strategies.

I have always thought that teachers should not teach what to think but how to think, and I wanted to embody this attitude within my own practice of teaching Classics. It was also interesting to me to link this to the ongoing debates in history teaching surrounding the relationship between the acquisition of substantive knowledge (i.e. the facts of history: dates, battles, names, etc.) and the acquisition of second-order concepts (i.e. the framework within which such knowledge is understood: e.g. historical interpretations, ascribing significance to events, understanding causation). According to Ford, ‘the challenge of restoring the link between substantive knowledge and conceptual understanding is one which the whole profession needs to address’ (Ford, 2014, p.33). Having previously taught philosophy, causation seemed to me to be a topic I would be well-suited to tackle, and I was intrigued to discover that there were opportunities to teach causation as early as Key Stage 3 (KS3). In fact, enshrined in the current National Curriculum (NC) for KS3 history is the key aim ‘to understand historical concepts such as … cause and consequence’ (DfE, 2013, p.1). Given that Stanford professor Sam Wineburg (2001) refers to historical thinking, albeit archly, as an ‘unnatural act’, I wondered whether it was possible for 12 and 13-year old students to ‘understand’ the complex concept of causation. But I was also eager to test out some of the pedagogical theories floated at the beginning of the PGCE course, in particular, Bruner's hypothesis that ‘any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development’ (Bruner, 1960, p.33).

While observing A-level students at my PP2 school, I noticed that their responses to classical texts largely consisted of the identification of stylistic tropes. The students could identify a text's stylistic features but they struggled to articulate and develop their own personal reactions to the text. They had been well-trained in this sort of ‘feature-spotting’ and therefore their reading experience was narrowly mechanical rather than genuinely exploratory. Every passage they encountered was put through the same analytical process with the unsurprising result that every classical author ended up sounding much the same. This seemed to me to be fundamentally passive way of engaging with literature. I was struck by Muir's contention that ‘the pupil should not be a passive recipient in the study of literature’ (!974, p.515). Hence, I wanted to devise a teaching strategy that would enable my students to be more active in the formulation of a personal response to the text.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to take notes for Pliny the Elder? Surely he had a secretary to assist him with his writing, or did he take his own notes? He left a huge body of material in his Historia Naturalis. What must his home office have looked like with all the detritus of constant writing and research scattered about? I have often wondered these things and many others about the process of ancient writing. As a Latin teacher, I decided to try out ancient writing with my students as a STEM project.

Did educated people in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance use Latin routinely (Medieval Latin and Neo-Latin), rather than a regional vernacular, to conduct real-life conversations about ordinary, everyday matters? Were they taught how to do this in the schools of the day with the help of specimen written dialogues (colloquia)? Did their teachers use a Renaissance equivalent of the ‘direct method’, and did they teach Latin in the way that modern foreign languages are taught today? Or was spoken Latin, with a simulacrum of practical relevance to everyday life, a way of ‘bringing the subject to life’, an enjoyable diversion from the standard pedagogical fare (the ‘grammar grind’)? These are the questions that this article addresses. I argue that Latin was not generally used for everyday conversations, and that students were not taught how to conduct them outside the classroom any more than they are today, though spoken Latin was used as a medium for teaching and learning Latin, as it is to some extent today. Since Latin was not the first language of any native speaker, and since it was learned as a language primarily for reading and writing, comparisons with the teaching of modern foreign languages are specious. I also argue that spoken Latin today, as a pedagogical tool, is best kept out of the classroom and used, if it must be used, as a hobby or a pastime. It has limited usefulness as a means of learning Latin to a meaningful level (a level at which the learner can engage with original Latin texts). And the kind of Latin that is spoken in the classroom, an attempt to render a spoken form of Classical Latin, however ‘correct’ it may be grammatically and phonologically (and the grammar and phonology even of Classical Latin changed over time), is most unlikely to have been spoken routinely in the same kind of informal situations by an educated (one who is adept in Classical Latin) native speaker of Latin. In fact, the more ‘correct’ it is, the less likely it is to resemble authentic everyday spoken Latin, even of the educated elite that learned Classical Latin. This is even more the case after Classical Latin came increasingly to be different from the contemporary Latin that anyone spoke, and had increasingly to be learned from grammar books as if it were a second language. What Quintilian says of written Latin may be said of educated spoken Latin too: aliud est Latine, aliud grammatice scribere.

This assignment investigates the effects of various questioning strategies on the engagement and attainment of a Year 8 Classics class1. I became increasingly interested in questioning whilst reading more widely about Assessment for Learning (AfL) for my School Experience Report (SER), and decided that the omnipresence of questioning in every classroom would make it a valuable focus for this report. Building on my understanding of the importance of questioning as an AfL strategy, my aim was to devise a series of lessons making explicit use of different types of questioning and to analyse the relative successes and failures of each approach. This was measured by assessing overall class participation and by specifically studying the responses and involvement of five ‘focus’ students. Profiles of these students are below and each student has been allocated a pseudonym.

Contextual or background knowledge performs an important function in second language learning and reading comprehension, as a number of theoretical and empirical studies have shown (see, for instance, P. L. Carrell, 1983, 1982). To the extent that Ancient Greek and Latin are verbal codes too, they constitute no exception to the aforementioned principle. Indeed, contextual knowledge is particularly relevant to reading comprehension in Classical Languages, given the time, material, and cultural gap between their original context of use during antiquity, on the one hand, and the context of the contemporary learners of these languages, on the other. Addressing and integrating this type of knowledge into Classical Latin courses is, therefore, expected to aid student comprehension of both original and adapted classical texts.

Many teachers in the UK are aware of the issues surrounding a grammar-translation approach to teaching the classical languages but do not see any alternatives. One of the purposes of this edition of the Journal of Classics Teaching is to offer a series of articles which provides an overview of an approach called Comprehensible Input. This brief article has been written to provide an introduction to some of the basic questions and point the reader towards the relevant articles.

We are grateful to the editor of JCT for offering us the opportunity of outlining our views on the need for a new Greek reference grammar, to discuss our methodological principles, and to offer some thoughts on how the book may be useful as a teaching resource.

Over the last 20 years in the United States a curious and likely unpredictable movement has been evolving in the way that we teach Latin and ancient Greek. A set of pedagogical principles known as Comprehensible Input (hereafter CI) has become a vehicle of change affecting our classrooms, our professional organisations and our teacher training programs as well as our relationships with and our positions in world language organisations. These changes to the teaching of classical languages were unpredictable because at the outset CI represented a set of hypotheses and then principles that even their progenitor, Stephen Krashen, thought of as the way into acquiring modern languages while teachers of classical languages had constructed a fortified wall around themselves built on the notion that Latin and ancient Greek were uniquely different from modern languages and, therefore, required different approaches. In many iterations of this wall, only a select cadre of students was thought (and easily demonstrated to be) capable of or even interested in mastering classical languages. This article will examine very briefly what this wave of change has been like in the Latin classrooms and institutions of the US and examine in particular the principles of Comprehensible Input: what they propose, how they are being practised in Latin classrooms, and the obstacles they encounter as well as opportunities they afford Latin programs which intend to survive and thrive in the coming years.

According to Second Language Acquisition (SLA) theory, developed by Stephen Krashen, the way humans acquire languages is through receiving input, usually aural, that is understandable; this is termed ‘Comprehensible Input’ (CI). Think, for example, of a parent talking to their child: when they ask the child, ‘Do you want milk?’, the milk is visible, tangible. The child understands that they are being offered milk. Parents don't just say this once, they offer it hundreds, even thousands of times. According to this hypothesis, the input (the parent talking) is comprehensible (the child understands it); the brain is trained to automatically make meaning.

Actors of Dionysus (aod) is a charity and theatre company with 26 years of experience of creating radical adaptations of Ancient Greek drama and new writing productions inspired by myth. Since 1993 we have toured over 50 productions nationally and internationally, performed to over 750,000 people and become the UK's leading interpreters in this field.

Iran's geography gives it an important place in the world. To the west lie Turkey, Iraq and Syria. South is Arabia and the Persian Gulf. To the southeast is the Indian subcontinent. To the north are Russia and the Caucasus. To the northeast lie the developing states of Central Asia. To the east, Afghanistan and China.

As for the benefits of moving away from grammar-translation to more comprehension-based and communicative language teaching (CCLT), few can argue they are insignificant and dismissible. In fact, the more one hears about thriving Latin programs, reduced teacher stress, increased student engagement, and inclusivity of all learners, the harder it becomes to justify pedagogical practices of the last 300 years or so (Musumeci, 1997). Still, hearing about current changes to teaching practices often leaves teachers perplexed. Where to start? Not only can navigating 40 years of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research be daunting, but teachers are often left with a lack of support and practical resources to affect any change. In many cases, even the change itself is feared.

While many Latin teachers are successfully implementing Comprehensible Input-based practices1 in their classrooms, plenty of teachers are hesitant to do so - and for good reason. One need only follow the discussions on the various blogs and Facebook groups dedicated to CI-based practices to see a predictable arc that goes from enthusiastic implementation to giving up and falling back on previous practices. Teachers who are attracted to CI-based practices are often those who also are frustrated with the traditional textbooks and curricula, and so a change in methods is often accompanied by a loosening of a traditional unit structure, or even the daily and weekly structure of a traditional language classroom. To do this, however, is to confuse the content of classroom instruction with the practices that contain them, the latter being an important element of classroom management.

Latin is no longer the exclusive dominion of the elite. The Latin language is now accessible to all types of students as a result of the shift towards the use of Comprehensible Input in the Latin classroom. Part of making Latin accessible to the many involves divorcing oneself from limiting beliefs about what constitutes content in the Latin classroom. Enter Blaine Ray and Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS).