AP Latin Vocabulary

Revised AP Latin 2025: Good News…Still Bad News…And Maybe Even Worse News

/ magisterp / 1 Comment

**Update 7.20.23 – This post was SOMEHOW deleted and nowhere in my trash folder?! I’m guessing it occurred when WordPress updated to the JetPack app. I know, you don’t care, but I Just wanted to say that I found the post in its ENTIRETY using the Wayback Machine. Here it is if you wanna see!**

When the draft of the new revised AP Latin course was released, I simultaneously couldn’t care less yet was also amazingly intrigued. So, I did another analysis like the one a few years ago. In short, the good news is that 1) the total amount of Latin has been reduced by about 25%, 2) quite a bit of “OTHER” Latin has been suggested as comprising a third of the overall syllabus alongside Virgil & Pliny, and 3) the revised course has been officially recognized as a second year college equivalent. Now, the bad news…

The Same
The revised course is fundamentally the same. While the draft name-drops the trending “language acquisition” phrase, the core texts are still very, very far above the reading level of nearly every student who will take AP Latin. This, in no way, is a tenet of language acquisition, whatsoever. Even methods and theories encouraging a “productive struggle” would draw the line well before anything like Vergil & Pliny after a few years of a new language. Beyond that, most high school students have no business taking a second year college course, anyway. BuT Ap Is AdVaNcEd, RiGhT?! Sure. The problem, though, is all the schools that choose AP as their program capstone without any other option, weeding out kids who “can’t cut it,” and/or backwards designing the whole program down to freshmen year (or lower for “feeder” middle school programs). When AP is used this way—which is very common—most students are denied a senior year language experience, or are unnecessarily forced to struggle through the content.

Core Text Vocab
The revised Vergil & Pliny selections vocab comes to:

  • 5,500 total words in length
  • 3,500 forms (i.e. aberant + abest = 2)
  • 1,800 meanings/lemmas (i.e. aberant + abest = 1 meaning of “awayness”)*

This particular Vergil & Pliny content not as bad as the current Vergil & Caesar content (i.e., down from 11,700 total words in length, 5,700 forms, and 2,600 total meanings/lemmas). Progress, right? But still nowhere close to what typical students have acquired by senior year. Using the same generous figure of seniors knowing 750 words by the time they begin AP coursework, there’s still more unknown than known vocab. Like, way more (i.e., 1050 unknown words of Vergil & Pliny remain!!). The AP draft also states that “the focus of the course is continued Latin language acquisition with the inclusion of some textual analysis and contextualization skills.” Uh…some…analysis and contextualization skills?! If the focus were actually on acquisition, students would be reading a LOT. To be clear, students still won’t be reading this kind of Latin. To truly “read” these texts, students would need to understand 98% of the Vergil & Pliny selections to have a chance at comprehending what’s going on (see Text Coverage). That ain’t gonna happen. But there’s more, and it might be worse…

The stats so far represent just 65% of the AP syllabus content!

Teacher Choice
The AP draft outlines setting aside about 1350 total words of poetry and 1650 total words of prose, all of the teacher’s choosing. This constitutes a third of the revised course content aside from Vergil & Pliny. Now, for this analysis, I got lucky with randomly choosing the recommended Ovid passages from Metamorphoses (i.e., 1450 words), and the Ciceronian letters (i.e., EXACTLY 1650 words). When we add these texts to the core Virgil & Pliny, unfortunately, we get a chart that basically mirrors the current AP one:

While the 2025 AP draft shows the total amount of Latin being reduced by about 25%, it turns out that the vocab difference is only about 4% less (i.e., 2600 total words currently vs. 2300). Progress…right? Here are a few different charts to help visualize all that:

Wildcard
Yet I chose Ovid & Cicero. The big wildcard is Teacher’s Choice portion of the AP syllabus. Surely, the impact of choosing text Y or author Z will vary, yet by how much? I was curious about that impact, but I do have a day job, other hobbies, and Ph.D. coursework to do. Rather than look at multiple combinations of poetry and prose, perhaps looking for the most extreme outcomes, I kept Ovid and replaced the Cicero letters with different prose selections amounting to ~1650 words of Latin to see what came up.

Starting with Sallust (Bellum Catilinae,, 5-15), the results were pretty close with just 10 more words added given all the vocab in common with Vergil, Pliny, and Ovid. Next, I pieced together an assortment of Gellius’ Vestal passage in Noctes Atticae (1.12), Eutropius’ founding of Rome in Breviarium Historiae Romanae (1.1-8), and the first five characters of Hyginus’ Fabulae. After all, the stated point of including this “OTHER” Latin is for encouraging teachers “to explore Latin texts from different time periods written by a variety of authors.” The difference between using this assortment of selections instead of Cicero wasn’t staggeringly worse. Then again, it did add about 50 more unique words, increasing those vocab demands, now coming within 200 words of the current AP syllabus!. The point? The Teacher’s Choice portion—a third of the AP syllabus—has the potential to meet (surpass?) the vocab demands of the current AP!

In sum, the revised AP course seems to be an all-too-common case in education: making progress in some areas yet ultimately falling short of addressing a fundamental problem. The 2025 AP is basically the same old thing (i.e., vocab demands are very close to the current AP with just ~4% fewer words) wrapped up in new packaging. I’m sure it will appeal to more teachers, but it doesn’t seem to deliver much else in terms of pedagogical improvements besides reduced workload and a tip of a hat to everyone reading “OTHER” Latin. So, maybe 2035 draft will be promising? I’ll be long gone from the classroom by then. Best of luck to everyone out there!

*Once again, for this analysis mostly done via Voyant Tools & Google Sheets, I rounded to the nearest 100, in the AP’s favor. Errors are unlikely to change things remarkably, and in all likelihood the situation is a little worse than what you see.

We Still Need More Books

/ magisterp / 1 Comment

I recently spoke to the M.A.T. students at UMass Amherst about writing novellas. My thanks goes out to Professor Closs for the invite. As we discussed my writing process and teachers and professors have been using novellas, I was reminded of a simple truth…

We need more.

I wrote about this three months ago. Since then, there have been four new novellas published, which is pretty good, but we still need more. Specifically, we need more books at lower levels. Why lower levels? The latest novellas range from 158 unique words to 750! That lower number represents a reasonable estimate of how many words a student acquires by the end of their first year, and the higher number how many words a student acquires by the end of their fourth year. What about during the first and second years when most students study Latin? Besides, students at a higher reading level benefit from reading below-level texts, even teachers!

In the Latin Best Practices Facebook group, I shared how I read Emma Vanderpool’s new novella of 158 unique words in about 40 minutes. The total amount of input I was exposed to was about 3,000 words. Compare that to the 2300 words of Fabulae Syrae (1000+ unique words?) that took me about 7 hours to read, and you see how much more input is possible with below-level texts. Remember that “books are easy” is one of five principles Jeon & Day (2016) identified for extensive reading! If students are reading independently, and extensively, that means books of not many words at all. Of course, when a teacher guides students through a text, that text can be at a higher level. Granted, that kind of close reading has been the status quo for Latin programs. The practice has been used to justify texts of ridiculously unrealistic expectations, and is just one source of Latin’s exclusivity. Disrupting that status requires changes to practices and expectations. Extensive reading is one of them, and only recently have there been Latin texts that lend themselves to independent reading. Nonetheless, when a learner is reading on their own and can control the pace of input, the text level must be much, much, much lower.

As a Latin teacher of first year language students, I’ve observed how more books written with fewer than 100 unique words would better serve everyone. Some learners really enjoy reading, yet their proficiency hasn’t increased to a vocabulary doubling in number—which is needed to reach 98% vocabulary coverage for the next books beyond the lowest—and this makes sense. Acquisition isn’t linear, nor should we expect it to be. Some learners are still at a 30-40 word reading level, which means they have like 5 books to choose from. This is also the third year I’ve had students new to the city appear mid-way through the year! Those learners don’t have much of a selection now that we’re reading at least 20 minutes on our own each week. We need more books.

Bottom line, though, we need books that all learners can read, whether it’s a first year student spending several classes doing so, or a third year student reading a whole story within 10 minutes! There really is no limit to how many of these we need, from a variety of voices, on a variety of topics, using a variety of writing styles.

AP Latin: There’s Bad News…And…Worse News

/ magisterp / 14 Comments

**Related: Revised AP Latin 2025**

I ran texts from the AP Latin syllabus through Voyant Tools:

  • 6,300 total words in length
  • 2,800 forms (i.e. aberant + abest = 2)
  • 1,100 meanings/lemmas (i.e. aberant + abest = 1 meaning of “awayness”)*

Based on the research of Paul Nation (2000), 98% of vocabulary must be known in order to just…read…a text. According to Nation’s research, then, Latin students must know about 6,175 words they encounter in the text in order to read the AP syllabus texts. That’s a text written with 1,100 words. To put that into perspective, it’s been reported that students reasonably acquire ~175 Latin words per year, for a total of something more like 750 by the end of four high school years. Needless to say, there’s a low chance that all 750 would be included the Latin on the AP, and that varies from learner to learner. Even if they were, though, 750 is still only 68% of the vocabulary at best. Although this percentage isn’t the same as text coverage since it doesn’t account for how many of the 1,100 words repeat, it’s safe to say that the number isn’t going to be wildly higher. Even approaching 80% text coverage is not good. We know that reading starts to get very cumbersome below 80%. This is just one reason why no student can actually read AP Latin. Oh wait…

****Those figures are just for Caesar****

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