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, and the gradual elimination of English translation as the learner builds up speed in understanding Latin in Latin. The fluency problems it addresses are just as relevant today as ever.

I thought I’d share my response with you all here.

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Salvē Br. Joseph,

I remember reading W. G. Hale’s essay a long time ago, long before I had become a teacher, and I remember being very encouraged and inspired by it, even though I would not become a CI supporter until much later. I just re-read it now, and it is still a great essay. What he says does work – that is, teaching students to read one word at a time, to analyse the relationships between words already seen, and to anticipate possible meanings. We may use a different mix of tools today, but his tools also worked. By saying that his method works, I don’t mean to say this is the only method which works, or that we must exactly replicate what W. G. Hale did. But I can definitely see how a student who read large amounts of Latin text in the way Hale recommends would gain momentum as they went along and would start reading literature more and more fluently. 

What makes me sad is that we don’t have nearly as much class time with students as in 1887. I can hear in his tone that he feels passionately that what he is doing is really beneficial, that he sees greater and greater fluency with his students after each successive year of daily exercises, but he wishes that the high school teachers had started doing these kinds of direct reading exercises with the students long before they arrived in college, so that he could spend more time just reading Latin in Latin with his college students. I feel like this happens a lot in high school Latin programs, where just as we’re starting to read really fascinating literature with the students, their time is up and they have to leave. They’ve just barely started to experience what riches Latin has to offer, or not even that, when they stop taking formal education. 

I have never been able to do what W. G. Hale did and read a Roman comedy for the first time aloud, cover to cover without stopping, and experience seeing the students understand every part of it that would be intelligible in an English translation without notes, because we never get to that level. No matter our educational philosophy, these days we simply don’t have the curriculum hours to reach that level he describes:

…at the end of a term spent upon Plautus, I read a new play straight through in the Latin (the students following me in their texts), without translation, and with very little comment, moving at about the rate at which one would move if he were reading a new play of Shakespeare in a similar way; and felt my audience responsive, even to the extent of occasional laughter that checked us for a moment, to nearly everything in our author that would have been intelligible, without special explanation, in an English translation.

Hale, pp. 36-37

For reference, in my school, Latin gets only 75 minutes per week at years 7-8, increasing in higher year levels to 150 minutes at years 9-10, then finally 225 minutes at years 11-12 when very soon they will leave. By contrast, in the 1860s, students in Eton spent 19 contact hours per week learing Latin and Ancient Greek (which, if divided equally between the two languages, would mean about 570 Latin minutes per week). They would have spent more total years in Latin as well. I think these contact hours may have been reduced somewhat by the time W. G. Hale was writing in 1887, and may have varied by region, but I think it would be safe to estimate that his students spent a lot more time in Latin instruction than the typical students of the 21st century. 

Other than that social context of how many curriculum hours are devoted to Latin, his essay almost reads like it could have been written yesterday. The only elements missing – which would need to be stated today – are that he makes no reference to the Input Hypothesis (as these theories of natural language acquisition had not yet been proposed in his day) and makes no comment on the usefulness of reading large amounts of level-appropriate Latin (what would have been called ‘confected Latin’ in his times), though granted, long connected passages of confected Latin in complete reader-style textbooks didn’t start to appear until the early 20th century, and I don’t know if there are any extant remarks from Hale about student texts like Fabulae Faciles or Puer Romanus, which were published in his lifetime. I suspect he probably might have initially felt these simplified pedagogical texts could be contrary to the true character of Latin writers, but perhaps he could have been persuaded that reading these easier texts at earlier stages would be an effective way to set up good habits for students to later read authentic texts in the way he describes. 

W. G. Hale’s experience with developing fluency among college Latin students is genuinely insightful, and a lasting reminder that people of the 19th century did not all teach Latin in a strictly stereotyped grammar-translation approach, but in fact some educators incorporated listening to unseen Latin as a key part of examinations (‘at the end of each term the first exercise at the final examination is translation at hearing’, p. 35) and offered Latin speaking and writing classes to round out the education of their pupils (‘A proper supplement to this is an elective in the speaking and writing of Latin’, p. 35). Upon rereading him, I even found a reference to a practice of explaining difficult Latin in Latin, by using alternative Latin constructions, to avoid having to explain Latin through English translation. (‘Here translation at the daily lesson ends, except in those rare cases where the meaning of a difficult passage cannot be given by explaining the grammatical structure, or by turning the passage into some other form in Latin.’ p. 35) This is very similar to the tiered reading technique of using paraphrases in easier Latin to explain more difficult Latin.

There really is nothing new under the sun!

Kind regards,

Carla