Suzanne Adema (Leiden University)
Latin students are caught in a Catch 22: they have to unravel the complex structure of sentences to comprehend Latin texts, while text comprehension is an important tool to unravel these sentences (Pennel-Ross 2008). Due to their struggle at the sentence level, students cannot really understand, experience and enjoy Latin narrative texts (cf. Janssen, Braaksma, Rijlaarsdam 2006). Their teachers need resources to take them from syntax to story.
In this paper, I present design principles for activities that take students from syntax to story. The basic principle is that students should be encouraged to do what good readers do. It draws on the premise of cognitive apprenticeship, in which ‘one needs to deliberately bring the thinking to the surface, to make it visible, whether it’s in reading, writing, problem solving’ (Collins, Brown and Holum 1991). Levine and Horton (2013) use the term literary apprenticeship for lesson plans that ‘pull the curtain back on the tacit interpretive processes that underlie literary sense-making’.
Starting point of the paper is an overview of empirical studies of comprehension processes of Latin students at the secondary level (e.g., Florian 2015, Luger 2018, Boyd 2018). These studies show that students tend to focus on the word or sentence level rather than on a text as a whole. Students generally start reading or translating immediately. They do not automatically recognize important and less important parts of a text.
Secondly, the behaviour of students is contrasted with insights from studies on discourse processing in proficient readers (modern languages). Before reading, proficient readers tend to scan a text to get an idea of the general structure of the text. While reading, they pause and reflect, a process that continues after reading a text (Duke 2011). In the specific case of narrative texts, readers build up a mental story world and imagine what it is like in this story world (Zwaan 2005, Herman 2009). Readers do this by using knowledge of language, genre and typical story patterns, as well as more general experiences (Kintsch 2005, Sanford and Emmot 2012). They recognize elements in a text that are salient for the retrieval of relevant knowledge and, thus, for story world building (Herman 2009, Comer and Taggert 2021, cf. Ellis 2017).
The last part of the paper presents design principles for class activities. These should let students practice scanning a text, make them pause while reading and make them reflect after reading (Van Oeveren 2019). They should make students recognize salient elements for the retrieval of background knowledge, and they should stimulate students to use this knowledge in building and, especially, experiencing the story world. In Latin narratives, examples of salient elements are, for example, names of persons and places, but also linguistic elements like tense usage and particles (Adema and Van Gils 2017). I illustrate the design principles by means of an activity in which students learn to recognize and use information about suspense patterns in Latin stories.