nle syllabus
Pisoverse Summer Additions: Recently Published Works
June & July have seen several additions to the Pisoverse. With the low unique word counts and numerous cognates included throughout, the novellas now provide over 28,700 total words for the beginning Latin learner to read! That’s with a vocabulary of just 360 unique words across all texts! Here are the latest publications:
Teacher’s Guide & Student Workbook for Pīsō
The 238 pages of support for Pīsō Ille Poētulus are finally here! In addition to invaluable information about Latin poetry, this Teacher’s Guide has 13 ready-to-go options for interacting with each chapter of Pīsō! Head to the copier, or project on board. Use them all, or choose a few per chapter; do whatever you’d like!
Pīsō Poetry Audio Album
Pīsō Ille Poētulus is a poetry novella, so don’t overlook the Poetry Audio Album as a classroom resource, or more importantly, to improve your own rhythmic fluency. If a picture is worth a thousand words, the audio is invaluable when it comes to “feeling” the rhythm of Latin poetry. You can get it on iTunes or Amazon, but it’s better to download from Band Camp! Alternatively, I can mail it to you on a USB Drive. Continue reading
We don’t teach grammar? Oooooh, sure we do…
I’m working on the Teacher’s Guide to Pīsō Ille Poētulus, and thought I’d share exactly what the practice “shelter vocabulary, unshelter grammar” looks like. To begin with, the conventional language teacher has crippling anxiety at the apparent lack of grammar in my classroom, but oooooh is it there, and oooooh is it understandable. The major difference in a comprehension-based communicative classroom like mine, however, is that grammar just isn’t taught explicitly, though pop-up explanations abound (e.g. “Mr. P, why does that word have a ‘-t‘ on it?”).
The reason my students don’t need explicit grammar instruction to understand Latin is because a) conscious grammar knowledge isn’t necessary to read Latin (or ANY language), b) internal learner constraints prevent students from noticing grammar features before they are ready, and c) grammar syllabi are sequenced in artificial ways that don’t match the order of what students are ready for. Instead of explicit grammar teaching and the grammar syllabus, students need a net of input, and that net has to be HUGE so that something particular that any given student at any given moment of time is ready to soak up is actually floating around in the input (and not just 3 person singular for 2 days, 2 weeks or 2 months, etc.).
Students who read Pīsō are exposed to a broad net of grammar. Oh, and there are some cultural topics in the target language, too. Here’s what you’ll find JUST in Chapter 1—the first 4 pages of Pīsō…
Magister P. 