sīgna zōdiaca Vol. 3: Published!

December 16, 2020December 16, 2020 / magisterp / 2 Comments

This last of three volumes contains details about Pisces, Aries, Taurus, and Gemini, and features the myths of Typhon, The Golden Fleece, The Minotaur, as well as Castor & Pollux.

Volume III itself contains 62 cognates and 93 other words (excluding names, different forms of words, and meaning established in the text), and is over 3,000 total words in length. The vocabulary across all three volumes comes to 83 cognates and 117 other words. Including all Pisoverse texts, the total number of words written for the beginning Latin student is now just under 65,000 using a vocabulary of just over 800.

Many details in the first four sections of astrologia are repeated from volumes 1 & 2 to provide each reader with a basic understanding of the zodiac signs. sīgna zōdiaca Vol. 3 is available…

For Sets, Packs, eBooks, and Audio—with reduced prices—order here.
Three-volume-pack special!
Amazon
eBooks: Storylabs & Polyglots
Audio
Free preview (abridged astrologia section, and Piscēs, no illustrations)

0 To 70: Five Years of Latin Novellas

August 25, 2020August 25, 2020 / magisterp / Leave a comment

This September marks the fifth anniversary of the first two Latin novellas written with sheltered (i.e. limited) vocabulary for the language learner by co-authors Rachel Ash & Miriam Patrick, and Bob Patrick. There are now 70. That’s 0 to 70 in five years, and a whopping total figure of over 228,000 words of new Latin! What has the impact been? Let’s take a look…

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Story Template Using Top 16 Verbs

April 2, 2018April 2, 2018 / magisterp / 1 Comment

Keith Toda just posted about writing simple texts and parallel stories for extensive reading use, such as during Free Voluntary Reading (FVR). Follow this template to create simple texts from scratch using the Sweet Sēdecim (Top 16). Also follow this template starting with any text (e.g. the simplest version of an Embedded Reading, a parallel story, a textbook chapter, a Write & Discuss, details from Discipulus Illustris, a myth, etc.). This will get you practice writing for the novice:

Setup:
(is, is in, likes)
Conflict:
(there isn’t, doesn’t have, wants [to ___], wants to go)
– Interactions: (sees, hears, says, thinks, knows)
New Location(s):
(leaves, comes to, is in, goes)
– Interactions: (sees, hears, says, thinks, knows)
Resolution/Unresolved Ending:
(if item/object: someone carries, puts, gives, if action: character is able)

Example: Here’s a 250 total word length story I could add to the FVR shelf as another comprehensible option…

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Lindsay Sears on Tiers!

March 19, 2018March 19, 2018 / magisterp / 3 Comments

At CANE’s 2018 Annual Meeting this past weekend, Lindsay Sears gave the rundown on bottom-up and top-down approaches to creating tiered versions of texts. What caught my attention was seeing how just a few messages of unadapted Latin became paragraphs of comprehensible text for the novice. That is, the original 8 lines of poetry (of 46 words; 45 of them occurring 1x) nearly doubled in length with each tiered version. The result is students reading MORE Latin that they understand, especially if they read all tiered versions. Lindsay knows how to tier texts, and she does it well.

Beginning with 8 lines of Ovid that few students could understand without pages of notes and a dictionary, we were shown how to get subsequent versions down to one that ANY novice could read. Her steps were clear and concise; moreso than “make each version simpler.” Here they are as distilled as possible. For bottom-up stories (e.g. text to accompany MovieTalk), reverse the order:

1st Tier down from original
– begin with a compelling text (already with high frequency words, if possible)
– rearrange order to be clearer & shorten sentences
– break into paragraphs to create white space & supply verbs/subjects

Next Tier
– replace vocab/obscure names with synonyms
– simplify complex constructions (i.e. make meaning clearer, which might mean using the subjunctive!)
– add anything missing

Next Tier
– break up all compound sentences, removing conjunctions
– keep simplifying & remove “flavor text” (i.e. unnecessary) modifiers/adverbs
– replace vocab with high frequency & entire explanatory phrases/sentences!

Next Tier!
– short sentences & basic idea

Former Student Studies Linguistics

January 29, 2018January 29, 2018 / magisterp / Leave a comment

So, I got my first “hey Mr. P, remember me?” email from a former student. Oh no, they found me! Naw, it’s not too hard. I’m the only person on the planet with my name, so…

Anyway, here’s the gist of that email:

“It’s ___, your former student, now majoring in linguistics at _____ in no small part due to your teaching style.”

That’s interesting.

Why? Because I didn’t explicitly teach grammar or focus on information about the target language when teaching. We were communicating in the language, co-creating stories in real time, and then reading them. I was providing CI (i.e. comprehensible input…the messages students understand), learning about students, and personalizing content. Grammar wasn’t the focus of class at all, yet somehow this student was inspired to learn more about languages. That’s cool.

There’s still soooooo much resistance to teaching with CI. The classic argument is that doing so “won’t prepare students” for studying Classics, linguistics, or related fields in college. Seeing how most traditional programs aren’t doing a great job of preparing students per se anyway—rather it’s the individual student that makes it happen—I’d say we’ll see the death of the “they won’t be prepared” argument sometime soon. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?