Combining Wheelock’s & LLPSI: An Introduction

Salve/salvete!

This year, I am teaching Latin I for the first time at a college level. I am a graduate student instructor at a university where Wheelock’s Latin is the standard text for beginning undergraduate Latin courses, and is typically covered in two semesters; chapters 1-20 are taught in the first course (Latin I), and chapters 21-40 in the second course (Latin II). Since there is not always continuity between instructors from one level to the next (a student may have different instructors for Latin I and Latin II, for example), instructors are expected to cover the grammar from the Wheelock’s chapters outlined above but are free to choose their own approaches and textbooks.

Given these preliminaries, I have decided to teach with Lingua Latina per se Illustrata (LLPSI), while supplementing with and covering grammar from Wheelock’s, among other sources. I’ve taken a hybrid grammar-translation and comprehensible-input based approach and have decided to write about my experiences teaching this semester on this blog. This post will lay out my plans for the semester, including methods, pacing, and course schedule, as well as some very preliminary Week 1 observations. I will post here once a week or once every two weeks on Saturdays to record my experience, both for myself and for other educators/learners. I’ll talk about what worked, what didn’t work, what activities I used, etc. So follow along if you’re interested. I’d imagine this content will be most useful to you if you a) teach Latin at a college level, b) are interested in different pedagogical approaches, c) have some constraints on methods, curriculum, and/or pacing, or d) are simply along for the ride!

Texts:

As stated above, I am using LLPSI as my primary text while making sure I cover (more or less) the grammar concepts in Wheelock’s Ch. 1-20. This means that we will be reading Chapters 1-17 or so of LLPSI, while supplementing with sections from Wheelock’s and other textbooks, novellas, or stories I come up with. There is a fair amount of overlap between the two books in terms of grammar covered, but I’ve had to add certain topics earlier than introduced by LLPSI. Perfect verb forms, which LLPSI does not begin introducing until chapter 21, are introduced in chapter XII of Wheelock’s; accordingly, I plan to teach the perfect about halfway through the semester, which will require me to provide materials outside of or adapted from LLPSI.

I chose LLPSI as my primary text mainly because of its focus on reading. If our goal is for students to be able to read authentic texts at some point, they should be reading as much as possible from day one. Like every textbook, however, LLPSI has its problems (see Seumas Macdonald & Gregory Stringer’s excellent series on this topic). One of these problems is that it introduces vocabulary too quickly, to the point that readings become less comprehensible unless more time is devoted to them. When we get to the point in the semester at which students become overwhelmed by the amount of new vocab (and I am sure we will), I will provide them with as much comprehensible input as possible, encourage them to re-read and re-listen to chapters, and use a number of pre- and post-reading activities to consolidate learning. But I’m also realistic about the fact that we’ll be moving through the book too quickly for them to acquire everything.

Class structure:

I meet with my students for 50 minutes, 4x/week, amounting to 3 hours 20 minutes of instruction. I’ll cover about one chapter of LLPSI per week, but some weeks will cover more or less. For example, I plan to introduce relative pronouns early and spend more than a week on them, since Cap. VIII of LLPSI (where a whole bunch of pronouns are introduced) tends to be overwhelming for students. On the other hand, I plan to combine the grammar instruction for Cap. V and VI into one week, as students will have been introduced to many of the topics earlier in the term.

I am conducting the class in both English and Latin. I use Latin for warm-ups (like basic locutiones or days of the week), games, targeted reading/listening/writing/speaking activities, and sometimes, grammar instruction. I use English for the remaining grammar instruction, to assist with comprehension when students need help with a word or definition (e.g. “amicitia significat ‘friendship’”), and for practicing translation. My primary goal is for them to get as much exposure to the language as possible, through practicing the four basic language skills listed above. But as they will be expected in their future classes to know English grammar terms and to be able to translate into English, I’d like to make sure they leave the class with those skills as well.

Methods:

I am using a combination of Comprehensible Input-based methods (CI) and Grammar-Translation methods (GT). This means that I try to give students as much input they can understand at sight as possible, and that we will do lots of reading and re-reading. My main goal is that students understand and acquire as much of the language as possible, which I believe is best done through comprehensible input-based methodology.

Another goal is for the students to develop translation skills, with the knowledge that translation is a skill that develops apart from language acquisition itself. I have been careful here to explain this distinction to students, making it clear to them that reading and translation are separate skills, and that we will read without translating sometimes.

A final goal is for students to develop meta-cognitive skills about how the language works. These are what we would commonly call “grammar skills.” This is where Wheelock’s and more traditional GT methods come in. For the most part, I will try to introduce grammar after reading so that students already have a mental representation of it. If they’ve seen sentences like Iulius est pater Marci 10+ times, they’ll understand how genitives work more intuitively.

Homework & Assessments:

I give homework each night, which could be one or a combination of the following: some of the pensa at the end of each chapter, some of the exercises from Nova Exercitia (a supplemental workbook), reading, listening, YouTube videos, Gimkit practice sets, or short writing activities. I aim to give students about 30-45 minutes of homework per night.

I plan to give short, weekly quizzes geared toward accomplishing the goals set out above. The main section of the quiz will focus on a passage of Latin and reading comprehension questions about the passage. I will also ask them to translate a sentence or two and recognize grammatical forms within the passage. I will not quiz them on vocabulary; demonstration of passage comprehension should give me a good idea of their vocabulary knowledge. Midterm and final exams will be structured in roughly the same way.

Week 1 Observations:

During the first week of classes, we discussed the course’s overview and methodology and completed Cap. I of LLPSI. I began each class with a short spoken activity using basic conversational phrases. For each activity, I wrote words and phrases like iterum, non intellego, lentius, quid significat…?, quomodo dicitur…? on the board so that students could ask for help if needed. Most of the activities consisted of me speaking, gesturing, and clarifying, but students were quick to respond to my questions and showed their comprehension through nods and body language. I was a bit worried that students would find these types of activities silly, and while sometimes they did, there was lots of laughter and joking too. I think sometimes as college instructors, we forget how much an element of playfulness can add to the classroom!

Another big takeaway has been that students respond well to clear explanation of methods. This may seem obvious, but so often, especially in university teaching, we simply ask students to follow along without telling them why we’ve decided to do something in a particular way. In my case, methodological explanation meant telling my students how language acquisition works on a basic level and why I’ve taken this approach to teaching Latin. I was concerned that my students would be opposed to spoken Latin in the classroom but have found the exact opposite after explaining the meta-reasons behind my pedagogical decisions.

In other parts of class, we read through the chapter together and did circling questions (Ubi est Roma? Roma est in Italia, etc.), and discussed number and gender in both English and Latin. I’m impressed by how much they can already understand and am excited for the rest of the term.