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We need to talk about Latinitas.
We need to be allowed to talk about Latinitas in the context of Latin teaching. What follows is a 7,000 word explanation why. In the course of this essay we will explore the effects of mandating a veneer of public positivity about CI Latin novellas and why this is problematic. As a community we need…
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Do we have too many English translations of the Aeneid?
Recently, I wanted to compare many different English translator’s approaches to a particular line in Vergil’s Aeneid, but I discovered that there was no easy reference chart online listing all English translations of the Aeneid. The few aging websites that had some partial bibliographies only listed a handful of translations, and did not include notable…
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Nothing new under the sun: Learning Latin through all four modes in 1887
Recently I was emailed by someone asking what I thought about an essay called “The Art of Reading Latin: how to teach it” by W. G. Hale of Cornell University published in 1887. The essay is a fascinating document in that it advocates for the incorporation of reading, listening, speaking, and writing in Latin instruction,…
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The case for professionalising in CI Latin independent book publishing
I’ve been an amateur producer of web content almost all of my life. But as I reflect on the publication and positive reception of The Lover’s Curse: A Tiered Reader of Aeneid 4 I’ve come to a greater appreciation and respect for the professional, mainstream, slow-moving avenues of book publication. There is an argument that…
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Tiered Readers to be Published in the Near Future (Tiered Readers, Part 4 of 4)
It’s so close! The launch party for The Lover’s Curse: A Tiered Reader of Aeneid 4 is happening this weekend at the following times (click here to join, or click the thumbnail below): This is my final post in the series celebrating the publication of Latin tiered readers throughout the ages. While Part 1 shared…
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Tiered Readers in Recently Published Works (Tiered Readers, Part 3 of 4)
Welcome back to my series of posts celebrating tiered readers as I count down to the launch party for The Lover’s Curse: A Tiered Reader of Aeneid 4. In Part 1, I spoke about old tiered readers which are now in the public domain. In Part 2, I spoke about tiered texts in 20th century…
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Tiered texts in 20th Century Textbooks (Tiered Readers, Part 2 of 4)
In celebration of the upcoming launch of The Lover’s Curse: A Tiered Reader of Aeneid 4, I’m working my way through the history of published tiered texts. In the previous post (Part 1), I spoke about tiered texts that were old enough to be in the public domain. The next chapter of the history is…
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Tiered Readers in the Public Domain (Tiered Readers, Part 1 of 4)
Welcome to this series of posts about tiered readers written in celebration of the impending launch of my book, The Lover’s Curse: A Tiered Reader of Aeneid 4. I hope you can join me on Saturday 23 for the Livestream launch party at this link (or click the thumbnail below). For this post series leading…
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Latin Noun Case Recognition Flowchart
I developed this flowchart as a way to visualise how a student could use explicit knowledge of Latin case endings to arrive at a set of possibilities for what those forms could signify. I said ‘explicit knowledge’. I’ve been thinking more about the role of explicit knowledge in second language teaching. We shouldn’t reject a…
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‘Shelter vocabulary, not grammar’
If we promote CI teaching on the grounds that we are using a more rigorous, research-backed methodology, we need to base our pedagogical advice on what actual research is saying, or at least make it clear when we are speaking from carefully tested science and when we are speaking from messy, subjective experience. ‘Shelter vocabulary,…