The Department for Education (DfE) GCSE Subject Content for Ancient Languages embeds the study of literature as a significant requirement in the specifications of any Latin GCSE (DfE, 2018). Specifications are instructed to ‘require students to read a range of ancient literature, including at least one selection of prose and/or verse texts in the original language, adapted and abridged, as appropriate’ (DfE, 2018, p5). Furthermore, students are to be expected to respond to the literary style; show an understanding of the cultural and historical context; and compare and contrast ‘values and social practices from the ancient and modern worlds’ (DfE, 2018, p5). The two exam boards offering GCSE Latin, Oxford Cambridge and RSA (OCR) and Eduqas, take slightly different approaches to fulfilling these requirements. Both have a range of module options to choose from; however, OCR offers fewer choices of author in the original language (OCR, 2015), whereas Eduqas requires either six or ten different authors in its compulsory literature module (Eduqas, 2015).

Part way through the second school placement of my PGCE teacher training course I began to teach Latin unseen translation, where students are given an unfamiliar passage to translate, to a Year 13 cohort of just two students. The translation element of the course was proving challenging for both students – they struggled with language comprehension, and the A Level language course seems not very accessible to students with low prior attainment. Furthermore, my second placement school is an Upper School, so students start Latin from scratch in Year 9. Because of the time constraint those who choose take GCSE do the Eduqas Latin exam, which requires that slightly less grammar and syntax needs to be covered than the OCR syllabus (for example, the ablative absolute construction is absent from the Eduqas examination, but present in the OCR). For the small number carrying on in the 6th form, this results in a linguistic shortfall which has to be made up before beginning the OCR A Level specification. This seems to be a challenge even for very able Latinists, and more so for my two students, Alice and Michael (not their real names), and had presented an added barrier to their facility in grasping and translating complex language structures, both in unseen translations and the demanding set texts. Simply ‘practising’ by going through texts together was not proving helpful, as once my oral prompts during this process were removed and they were left on their own they reverted to guesswork instead of applying their knowledge and logic to the text. Similarly poor results in translation were evident from practice literature papers which they had taken before February half term, even though these were prepared texts – while the language paper asks students to tackle short unseen translations, the literature component calls for the extensive preparation of a much longer text, from which students must translate and analyse selected passages in the examination, as well as answering a broad essay question. However, despite the fact that Alice and Michael had been through their set text in detail with their teacher and made their own translations, it appeared that, when presented with a passage from the set text in exam conditions, the language looked just as intimidating to them as if they had not seen it before, and they were equally unable to produce a sensible attempt at translation. I therefore became interested in finding ways for them to approach texts which would minimise the ‘fear factor’ and allow them to access meaning without being put off by complex syntax.

Within this article I aim to explore how greater student dialogue in the classroom can drive engagement with ancient drama. As part of the Classical Civilisation A Level specification, students need to demonstrate knowledge and awareness in the examination of how Aristophanes’ Frogs might have been performed on stage and its possible reception by a classical audience. This research investigates how teachers can effectively encourage student discourse in the classroom for students to engage with and analyse Frogs as a piece of comic drama, rather than simply as an A Level set text.

This action research project investigates the effects of the use of ‘free composition’ in the teaching of Latin to a group of Year 10 pupils. By ‘free composition’ I mean pupils were not given English sentences to translate into Latin, as is the case in many Latin course books (see, for example, Cullen and Taylor's Latin to GCSE (2016)), but were told to use simple Latin sentences to tell a story of their own devising. The focus of the study will be on analysing pupils’ perceptions of the value of free prose composition and how free prose composition can be used to analyse pupils’ understanding of grammatical features by investigating the types of errors which they made.

The educational value of play has long been acknowledged. During recent decades, much attention has been paid to video games and the multifarious ways in which they can promote and enhance learning. Μy main objective in this study is to weave game principles, learning and the notion of playfulness into assessment principles, in an attempt to investigate how what I call ‘Game-Informed Playful Assessment’ (GIPA) can affect student learning and particularly students’ experience of learning. The GIPA was designed with a view to promoting students’ agency, autonomy, collaboration and playfulness, and was introduced in an undergraduate course on Archaic Greek Lyric poetry at a Greek-speaking university. My data was generated through in-depth interviews with ten of the students that attended the course. While the GIPA was favourably and even enthusiastically received by students, the research also brought to the fore several other issues that call for attention, such as the stress that innovative assessment may provoke in students, and the readiness of students to be playful within an academic framework that typically contrasts serious work with playfulness and play in general.

Trainees were encouraged to tell a mythological story to the class, lasting about ten minutes. They could use props and other visual aids if they wished, but the emphasis was for them to practise speaking before the class, using prompt cards if necessary, and employing all the techniques of a professional oral ‘poet’ – such as gesture, eye contact, tone of voice and so on. There is obviously considerable general interest among younger students about mythology. Locally, interest is captured by the Cambridge School Classics project which puts on an annual Ovid Mythology competition and the website War with Troy is used by several of the schools where trainees are placed. Its use as a stimulus for learning has been well-documented by its author and past PGCE subject lecturer Bob Lister (2005, 2007) and by Walker (2018), a former teacher trainee from the faculty. Some of the Latin textbooks such as Minimus (Bell, 1999) and Suburani (Hands-Up Education, 2020) contain myth episodes and are familiar to the teacher trainees. The GCSE and A Level qualifications often contain mythological subject matter. Khan-Evans (2018) has shown how older students of Classics have retained deep-rooted affection for mythological stories in their earlier schooldays. Research into the power of mythological storytelling as a stimulus for learning, creative arts and even therapy is current, as the Our Mythical Childhood project (2020) has demonstrated. A book of the project's work is eagerly anticipated next year. The recent Troy exhibition at the British Museum has also awoken considerable interest.

This piece originated as an article in In Medias Res on 31 May 2019 and has been updated for the Journal of Classics Teaching. The author would like to acknowledge the helpful feedback from the editors at In Medias Res and The Journal of Classics Teaching on earlier drafts of this essay. Their suggestions helped produce a superior piece.

We are now in our second year of Latin teaching at Lionheart Trust and it's fair to say that it has grown substantially as an initiative. The idea to teach Latin as an extra-curricular subject grew from our very positive experience of running Classics Clubs after school for Year 7s. These clubs were based on Greek and Roman mythology, local archaeology (plentiful given we are based in Leicester, a Roman city) and a little bit of Latin. The children loved all of these experiences and we realised quite quickly that there was an appetite for greater Latin teaching.

This article explores a model of teaching Latin at several state-funded secondary schools within the same geographical location. This model could work for Latin teachers who wish to reintroduce Latin to parts of the country where there are few ready-made jobs in Classics teaching. It will work best in an area where there are a number of secondary schools within easy travelling distance of one another.

This Journal published in 2016 an article by Jerome Moran on ‘Tense, Time and Aspect in the Greek Verb’ (Moran, 2016). It rightly pointed to the unsatisfactory nature of the treatment of the concept of ‘verbal aspect’ in available grammars and language courses, but did not sufficiently, I think, throw light on the issue for practising teachers and their students, nor did it satisfactorily clarify the intellectual issue posed. And yet this concept, which is not difficult to understand, is all-embracing and lies at the heart of the meaning of verbs in the classical language so that it is important to understand the distinctions it provides within the scope of the Greek verb.

This article records its author's travels to sites in Britain that either provide settings for or are relevant to the stories of the Cambridge Latin Course. A version of this article was delivered as an oral presentation, entitled ‘In the footsteps of Quintus Caecilius: visiting Roman Britain with the Cambridge Latin Course’, at the American Classical League Centennial Institute in New York in June 2019. The article provides an overview of the sites, attempts to situate them in the geography and history of Roman Britain, and considers how such knowledge might be of benefit to teachers and learners.