02 - Looking Beyond Athens in the First-Year Greek Classroom

Many standard textbooks focus explicitly (e.g., Athenaze) or implicitly (e.g., From Alpha to Omega, Greek: An Intensive Course) on preparing students to read Athenian authors of the 5th century BCE. Yet, even if students have a good command of grammar and vocabulary, the continuous prose selections introduced in many books remain challenging, because of their specialized content in genres largely unfamiliar to contemporary students (e.g., philosophy, rhetoric). And woe to those many whose grasp of the basics is less secure! For many years we have abandoned textbook selections after the first nine or ten weeks, in favor of encouraging continuous reading by using either a novel (e.g., Longus's Daphnis and Chloe), a gospel of the Greek New Testament, or some other continuous narrative prose (e.g., Lucian's Dialogue of the Courtesans). Even after a recent switch from a grammar-translation textbook to Athenaze, we chose not to continue with the second book, and instead to read Lucian's True History, interspersed with lessons crafted to support reading the text. While transitioning students to "real" Greek may be perceived as an advantage, we made this change for other reasons that have much more to do with engagement and equity. These texts, and others like them, allow us to: (1) focus on engaging students with works that employ a familiar narrative structure, which makes the students eager to see what happens next; (2) engage (in some cases) with parts of the Greek world, where we witness intercultural interaction; (3) offer texts that have a rich array of female characters and gendered subject positions, as protagonists; and (4) structure instruction on points of grammar, vocabulary, and syntax "as needed," much like modern language colleagues who teach using Content Based Instruction. Similarly, none of these texts will confound novice readers, who might derive the above benefits from other texts (such as Herodotus), but whose dialect is an impediment at this stage and more likely to cause confusion. Especially since those Athenian texts are likely to make an appearance in the intermediate and advanced levels, students who continue are not being deprived of texts that many of us love and see as foundational to one's Greek journey (though perhaps this is a notion that itself should be interrogated). Instead, these texts - and many others - offer a wealth of additional opportunities to engage and support our students' learning by offering them appealing readings more appropriate to their novice level.

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Presenters

Elizabeth Manwell, Kalamazoo College

  SCS-90