I was recently asked a very good question about how to change one’s assessments to align more with CI. By that, we’re talking about comprehension-based language teaching (CLT) that prioritizes comprehensible input (CI) in the Latin classroom. First, it helps to think in terms of what standards were being assessed beforehand, even if they weren’t explicitly called “standards.” These old standards were mostly discrete skills you’d expect to find in tests accompanying popular textbooks, like vocabulary recall, derivative knowledge, grammar identification, and cultural trivia. New standards based on CI—whatever they are—will have meaning at the core. My suggestion is to focus on assessing comprehension of Latin, because that’s more than enough to ask for. One benefit of this standard is that is that it has those old discrete skills embedded within something larger and more meaningful that you can assess (i.e., comprehension). Let’s look at how each one of the old standards is contained within assessing comprehension…
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