Pedagogy

Latin programs: what are each of us doing? what is working? This talk will present data collected from a survey of North American college and university Latin program directors and instructors, to be conducted September-October 2019, in the context of current pedagogical research. Surveyed topics include textbooks, methods, recruitment, integration of secondary Latin students, retention, and upper-level preparedness.

This poster presentation explores pedagogical applications of digital mapping technology. It reports on “Mapping Cicero’s Letters,” a project undertaken in an undergraduate Classics course in which students use the web application Carto to create visualizations from geo-spatial information in Cicero’s letters. This project exemplifies how digital visualization projects can teach important technical skills, while engaging students in detailed analyses of Roman mobility, geography, and history. We also consider some challenges of using evolving digital technologies in the college classroom.

As Christopher Francese notes in the introduction to the Dickinson Core Vocabularies <http://dcc.dickinson.edu/vocab/core-vocabulary>, teachers of Latin and Greek have long recognized that novice students will benefit greatly from first learning the most frequently occurring words in the language. More recently, research on second language acquisition shown that vocabulary, rather than grammar, is the most difficult aspect of reading for language learners (Day and Bamford 1998:78).