Growing out of Classical Association conferences in the UK in 2016 and 2018, this volume brings together critical reflection informed by theory and practice on the application and implementation of communicative pedagogies for historical languages (here Latin and Ancient Greek), from a wide array of contributors, diverse in location and teaching context.
The volume represents a significant step forward in the development, and push, for various groups, individuals and institutions practising or advocating these approaches in historical languages. This is both a summative step, reflecting movements that have been developing for some time, to the point where a volume of this scope and size is possible, as well as a catalytic step, likely to ignite new initiatives and new adopters, or experimenters, along these lines. Contributions fall into four parts, as does this review. The first two focus on teaching contexts of school and children, followed by colleges and universities. Part 3 turns our attention to immersion contexts, while the final section provides a few alternate contexts.
Schools: L. Manning's chapter opens with a historical overview of the place of active Latin in education as well as Manning's own observational research in how active Latin is employed in contemporary classrooms. For the communicative sceptic this kind of historical narration is a necessary obstacle-clearer, given that the narrative that grammar-focused instruction is traditional is a dominant one.
In the following few chapters newcomers to this topic will find pertinent aid. D. Urbanski, J. Affleck, J.M. Schwamm and N.A. Vander Veer offer critical reflection on their praxis as teachers, implementing communicative strategies to greater and lesser degrees. Particularly valuable here is the recognition of their teaching constraints, including students, time and ability. All such constraints affect any educator looking to implement communicative strategies.
J.S. Bailey's chapter reflects his ongoing trajectory from frontline teacher to teacher-trainer. He offers a theory-informed model for implementing communicative activities geared towards reading a specific Latin text, the shared goal of most Latin teachers. Undoubtedly the most practical chapter in the volume, its regular nods to theoretical underpinnings serve as reminders, if not leads, to the research that supports communicative frameworks.
Hunt, in contrast, turns attention to teacher training and development, strongly grounded in Hunt's own context of the UK school system and its emphases. While the UK context may be less relevant to some readers, Hunt's calls for a teacher-led shift to communicative practices, for which this whole volume may be considered an agent-provocateur, are broadly resonant.
Universities: the second part of the collection turns to university settings, an important conversation in its own right as communicative approaches have experienced widespread (though still minority) adoption in high school teaching but minimal inroads into higher education. Three of these contributions detail forays into teaching communicatively with Hans Ørberg's Lingua Latina per se illustrata, a textbook known and loved by its fautores for being entirely in Latin, and showing the late author's lifelong labour to carefully construct a text truly faithful to nature method principles. C. Ryan's chapter thoughtfully considers the needs of postgraduate students whose target texts are not the longstanding classics of a narrow slice of Roman antiquity, while C. Letchford's approachable chapter charts the experience of a teacher who had relatively limited prior exposure to communicative approaches.
Lloyd's piece should be highlighted for two reasons. Firstly, Lloyd's critical practice involved a course that had to be taught similar to other modern foreign languages, a requirement that very few historical language programmes are subject to (indeed, many are under regulations to not be taught that way). Secondly, Lloyd made recordings and then transcripts (with commentary) of her classes, allowing for qualitative and quantitative analysis of teaching practice, in terms of time spent in Latin as well as comprehension, difficulties and the nature of the Latin produced by teacher and learners.
D.B. Gallagher, in some ways a successor to Reginald Foster, offers up a treatment, promising and exasperating, of his implementation of Ludi Domestici in conversational Latin classes at Cornell. While Gallagher broadly describes and briefly illustrates the general varieties of in-language ludi that he sets, the variety and underlying rationale for composition remains elusive.
Within the flourishing of contemporary communicative Latin there still lies a divide between the Anglosphere (really, the USA and UK) and the rest of the world, which this volume partly reflects. While conversations in Latin unite, conversations about conversations in Latin generally take place in vernaculars. Hence it is so pleasing to see chapters examining communicative approaches in Brazil (L. Ribeiro Leite) as well as Poland (S. Domagała, M. Loch, K. Ochman) and Jerusalem (C. Rico, M. Kopf). Ribeiro Leite's treatment of Neo-Latin in Brazil is doubly refreshing, illustrating their own successful engagement of Latin as a language for communication as well as connecting to students via the Latin of a Brazilian writer, Josephus de Anchieta. The selection of clear pedagogical examples in this chapter is also laudable, as there is enough here that another teacher could take this model and apply it to their own context.
Immersion: Parts 3 and 4 move beyond school contexts and are grouped by the two themes of ‘total immersion’ and miscellanea. Despite the considerable credentials of the authors here, formal and not, there is an unfortunate tendency towards a review of one's wares. This is evident in the contribution of M. Minkova and T. Tunberg, well-known exemplars of spoken Latin, and their brief history and description of the Conventiculum Latinum Lexintoniense (a week-long Latin immersion convention) and the Institutum studiis Latinis provehendis (a Graduate Certificate curriculum in Latin at the University of Kentucky). Neither treatment appears to go beyond description to suggest either theoretical bases or practical offerings to others. This is not to downplay the critical role that Minkova and Tunberg have played in the use of communicative Latin, reflected not least in the development of other Conventicula, mirrored in the work of SALVI (absent from a formal presence in this volume) and inherited in the Σύνοδος Ἑλληνική described in the subsequent chapter by R.S. Hill.
Alongside the description of the Greek conventions, Hill marries a keen understanding and description of SLA theory with the practice of the σύνοδος. While I would strongly contest some of the theory here, for example whether M. Swain's Comprehensible Output hypothesis is well founded or supported, and to what extent K. Gregg's critique of S. Krashen is ‘devastating’, pedagogical practice ought to be theory-grounded. Hill's own examples of such activities, such as image and text pairing for discussion and task-based learning, provide both ready evidence of this as well as usable models.
The combination of a multi-year, higher-education and full-curriculum context with an immersion approach, in multiple historical languages, marks out Polis as a unique institution. The presentation of some typical classroom activities, by Rico and Kopf, gives a sense of what immersive communicative teaching can look like at all levels. Here is a clear answer to the common objection to how communicative teaching can work at the ‘upper’ levels of university education.
This also serves as a bridge chapter to D.R. Streett. There has long been a very lamentable divide between Greek and Hebrew pedagogy in biblical studies, and broader classics and historical languages. Streett's focus is biblical languages pedagogy in seminary contexts, an area of ongoing crisis (see for instance D. Miller's Greek Pedagogy in Crisis [2019], which surveys practices and results of grammar-translation in New Testament Greek studies in seminary contexts). This contribution is not so much practical or theoretical, as much as aspirational, inquiring into the end goal of language pedagogy and how this might shape our programmes.
The penultimate contribution in this section is another welcome contribution from outside the Anglosphere. Domagała, Loch and Ochman contextualise Latin pedagogy in Poland, the central role of the University of Wrocław, the immersion environment of the Schola Aestiva, and the large gap between Latin and other languages in the Polish educational system, illustrated not least by the 15–240 hours that Latin may get, in contrast to 990–1440 for a modern language (over twelve years, p. 173). The practical examples of teaching activities from the Schola Aestiva hold value not only for exemplifying communicative practices, but also for how teacher-led transformations may revolutionise an otherwise moribund system.
The discussion of student-led initiatives at Oxford and Cambridge parallels the previous chapter as institutionally adjacent initiatives where students (and academics) create spaces for communicative practices that lack formal homes. How ironic that the simple act of speaking Latin remains enough out-of-place that it takes place outside the walls.
Miscellanea: three chapters round out this volume and can reasonably be categorised as the kitchen-sink category. The Paideia Institute surveys its past and present programmes, seeking to combine immersive programmes with philology, in person and online, efforts perhaps once novel but now broadly represented.
D. Pettersson and A. Rosengren describe the work of Latinitium, one of the most well-known and high-quality sources of ‘content’ production in new Latin media – print, audio and audio-visual materials in Latin. The information here gives an insight into their rationale and success, and stands as representative for other similar, and growing, new Latin media.
Lastly, M.A. Hayes and P.M. Owens provide a unique study on L1 acquisition of Latin for two children in a bilingual home environment. While the finding that ‘Latin can be learned in the same way as other L1 languages’ (p. 209) should not surprise anyone with an ounce of linguistic sense, perhaps more useful is the evidence it suggests about (reasonably predictable) orders of acquisition and possible implications for teaching Latin to younger children.
An edited volume of this size, with the mantle of being the first in this field for a very long time, faces the challenges of overlapping content, avoiding either simple narration of teaching experience or promotion of programmes, and delivering instead material that will give teachers of historical languages both practical elements they can adapt to use as well as stimuli to critical reflection on their own pedagogies. This, with a few stumbles, Lloyd and Hunt have achieved. It remains only a start, though, which hopefully will serve as a catalyst to ongoing developments in the practice of communicative approaches.
