Extensive Reading Is Great

This past year, partly as a result of trying to teach Latin in The Netherlands, I have become very much impressed with Stephen Krashen's work in general, and certainly with the concept of Extensive Reading (which other people have taken on, of course). It has pushed my own language teaching even further to the left, so to speak. I was already convinced of reading, but I still thought grammatical exercises were important, very important. If I were teaching a class again now (and if I could do what I wanted), I really think I would ditch grammar exercises altogether and focus even more on reading. Tons of it. And good stories!

Not only am I more aware now than, say, a year ago, how (in retrospect) I learned German and Latin for sure, probably English to an extent, and even French mostly through extensive reading, i.e. reading (more or less) copiously, meaning that the material has to be easy enough for one's level and that the stuff one reads has to be interesting enough to keep turning the pages. More importantly, I've made an attempt to finally learn Italian beyond the absolute basics for the last few months.

In early August, I went to a bookstore to use some vouchers I had gotten as presents. I didn't know what to buy, but I was guided to the foreign languages section (this is in Maastricht, The Netherlands) and found a few easy readers in Italian, which seemed nice enough, so I bought them. And started reading. And reading. And reading.

Basically, I read a reader a day or so, for a couple of weeks. After moving to a different area of Germany and finding a decent bookstore, I picked up more readers. All in all, I think I have read between 30 and 40 of them, some more than once. I may write a bit more in detail about my experience, but I really think I've gotten quite a good idea of what's out there for easy readers in Italian.

Anyway, next thing I know, I'm in Italy. Just for a few days, to see friends (not Italians). Some interesting experiences. I am quite aware that, while my spoken Italian is still not terribly impressive, it's much better than it was even four months ago. Of course, I visited a few bookstores and picked up some real books--nothing easy or anything, just real Italian novels and non-fiction. 

Finally, on a brief stop in Udine, after walking around the old city in the rain (a charm all of its own in Italy), I did walk into another generic bookstore. Many, many books, but one was crying out to me, almost literally. It's a recent translation of a 1968 novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer, possibly the greatest of all Yiddish novelists: Il Ciarlatano. The book was written in Yiddish (of course!) and serialized in the Forverts, as many of Singer's novels. Then, somebody prepared an English translation (I think Singer's nephew sometimes did that, but apparently this one is anonymous), clearly intended for publication as a book, which however never came about, for some reason.

So this brand new Italian translation is actually the first publication of the novel as a book. In other words, if I wanted to read this novel by Singer that I didn't even know existed, I have no choice but to read the Italian translation.

And guess what: I am.

I realize that those three dozen of easy readers (levels A2 to B2, whatever that really means) in not even four months have enabled me to now read this fantastic novel in Italian without serious difficulty. I don't know every single word, but (I am proud to say) I really never look anything up. I understand the story in pretty much every detail (I think anyway). And, I have to say, I totally and utterly love it.

The book. And the fact that I'm reading it in Italian. Singer's New York jewish characters, each of them crazy in their own way, all immigrants from Eastern Europe, with Yiddish as their main and sometimes only language--now speaking perfectly idiomatic Italian! Singer is rolling over in his grave--with laughter, that is!

Also, as a by-product, I'm thinking of going back to learning Yiddish......... 

Grammar

Just now, I heard a very good line about grammar. It comes (I can’t check the citation at the moment, but I trust my source) from Kató Lomb’s famous book Polyglot: How I Learn Languages.

“You cannot,” says the famous Hungarian poly-polyglot, “You cannot learn language from grammar, but you learn grammar from language.”

What’s there to be added to that marvelous, super-succinct summary of all the misunderstanding about grammar teaching? I’ve written quite a bit about my experience teaching Latin and Greek in The Netherlands this year. What has happened to language teaching in my own country? 

Dutch as a school subject meant literature when I was in school (like, forty years ago). A short story here, a poem there. Medieval Dutch. A highlight of nineteenth-century Dutch literature (Max Havelaar). We famously had one grammar (spelling) lesson a year, followed by a quick test applying a few stupid rules (for those who know Dutch, this was mostly about applying the kofschip rules). It was no big deal. What I hear from students and pick up from a few colleagues now is that Dutch classes have become some horrible thing about grammar, vocabulary (?!), and more torture. What a surprise no high school graduate in The Netherlands wants to read Dutch in university anymore! (It may, by the way, also explain the general disdain of the Dutch for their own language and their embracing silly English expressions where perfectly fine Dutch equivalents are available.) 

The modern languages where taught grammar-based in the 1970s and 1980s, but there were some adventurous teachers who were clearly moving in a different direction, and it was not only about grammar and vocabulary, as it often seems to be today (or so I hear from my poor students--third year French, never read a book).

The Classical languages have been grammar-based for a long time in The Netherlands and despite excellent classicists (such as A.G. de Man in In grammaticis veritas [Groningen: Wolters, 1951]) ringing the alarm bell, very little seems to have changed for the past 80 years, or more likely a century and a half. No, something has. It’s even worse than when I was in school. More grammar (not that the kids actually learn it), less stories, much less learning. (Sorry, but I don’t give a penny for turning Latin and Greek into a kind of ancient history class, it seems to me a horrible sell-out, a cop-out for not learning the language, which indeed they don’t, and teachers seem to think it’s fine.)

So what is it with my Dutch colleagues and their odd belief in grammar? Anybody who speaks a few languages fluently knows s/he did not learn that language by studying grammar. The very best students I see in Latin and Greek read, read, read. I ask them, Do you think of grammar rules when reading? Oh no, sir, they smile, almost apologetically, except they do know I love their answer. We just read. If I don’t get it, one very good student adds, I just read it again. And then I get it. The grammar exercises in the reading book? Oh no, says the student, I skip those. And she is right.

Such students learn grammar from language. They have long understood that it ain’t work the other way around, like I found out, realizing I couldn’t read Latin to save my life after six years (very many hours, plus a very decent final exam) of Latin in high school. 

How come language teachers don’t seem to see that?

Disappointed Already

I asked my seventh-grade (first-year) Latin class this morning what they would like to be able to do with the language after their exam (following six years of Latin).

"Speaking," one boy said without loosing a beat. (I can't help loving that that's the first answer I get! This kid has no prejudice whatsoever about Latin being a d--d language.)

"Writing," his neighbor adds quickly. (OMG, how cool is that, he would like to be able to write stories in Latin, so wonderful!)

"Reading," says a girl in the same corner. "And translating," she adds, as she has already heard from other teachers that translating is the thing about Latin (and possibly also about French, German, maybe even English).

"Well," I said, "you can easily ask the students in twelfth grade how well they speak, write, and read Latin. Or, of course, I can give you the answer."

The class agreed they wanted me to give them the answer.

"Well OK," I went on. "Let's do it in order. Who thinks the twelfth-graders can speak Latin?"

The answer, of course, very sadly, is they can't. Most of the class figured as much, but you could still smell the disappointment. They obviously love it that I can speak Latin with them (yes, with them, because they are already able to give simple short answers in Latin) and would love to be able to do it themselves!

"Writing. Who thinks the twelfth-graders can write Latin kinda like you guys can write English?" (The class is a bilingual high school class, so their English is actually pretty darn good.)

By now, they start to sense that something is very wrong. Indeed, the answer is, of course, in the negative: not one of our twelfth-graders, I bet my bottom dollar, would be able to write a paragraph or even a halfway decent sentence in Latin to save their life.

"Reading, then? Well, no, not if you mean reading reading. I mean, if you have to look up every other word in your dictionary and the other ones in your grammar, do you call that reading?"

Of course they don't. So, case proven. After six years of Latin at a pretty decent high school in The Netherlands, nobody can read, write, or speak Latin.

Oh, translating? I wouldn't call it that myself. The grades need more help every year to make a reasonable amount of students pass their final exams. And the "Dutch" students produce in their so-called translations is famously horrendous.

Of course, all this could easily be different with a more sensible approach to teaching Latin. Erasmus, Grotius, Peerlkamp, and all those other great Dutch Latinists from centuries past are rubbing their skins off as they keep turning in their graves. What can I do? The sad answer is Very Little, but at very least I can make some students aware of the problem. That's a beginning, at least.

Normal and Common in Latin Teaching

I learned many years ago from a very wise man the difference, or presumed difference if you like, between “normal” and “common.” I honestly don’t know any numbers, and I’m not going to waste my time by looking them up, but an example is a “normal” body weight among, say, American children – that would be the “healthy” weight in relation to height, etc. – and the “common” body weight, caused by a diet heavily based on McDonald’s and KFC.

So if you can accept those contrasting definitions of “normal” and “common” for the sake of the argument, I’ve been thinking for a while about what would be “normal” in Latin teaching and what, by contrast, is “common.” So this morning, while sipping my coffee at this friendly German bakery and reading Ugo Enirco Paoli’s marvelous Ciceronis filius (a wonderful yet apparently little-known Latin reading book for, let’s say, advanced-intermediate students), I paused to jot down a few observations.

Normal (I omit the quotation marks from now on): Students learn Latin in order to be able to read Latin. Evidently, what Latin text you can expect them to read after, say, six years of study is open for discussion. But at any rate you’d expect them to be able to read some Latin for fun. Reading, of course, defines as reading, not “translating” at the rate of one sentence per hour with a dictionary and a grammar.
Common: Teachers plainly tell you they don’t expect students ever to read Latin after their HS exam. The point of learning Latin, they say, is to learn to think logically (I once heard a very experienced American HS teacher say that learning languages was a kind of brain gym), or to learn other languages more easily (like driving from Amsterdam to Cologne via Madrid), or to learn grammar in their own language (which by definition has a completely different grammar than Latin).

Normal: Teachers obviously like what they teach, so they read Latin often for their own enjoyment. Because they are able to read Latin with ease, they rarely study a Latin text in translation, because they don’t need to. (Doh! Which English teacher reads Dickens, J.D. Salinger, or Tom Wolfe in translation because the original is so hard?)
Common: Many teachers rarely if ever read anything in Latin at all, except of course the small portions read in “advanced” classes with students. Many teachers frequently refer to translations even when teaching beginning to intermediate classes. (If this seems hard to believe, why do teachers’ manuals print “literal” translations?) Teachers who like ancient history or philosophy read Sallust, Livy, or Cicero in translation.

Normal: Students read roughly the same amount of text in Latin that they would read in an average modern language curriculum. If they read, say, six books of a total of 300 pages in German, they can be expected to read a similar amount in Latin.
Common: Students read only a very small amount of Latin texts; to read as much as one complete book from Vergil or Ovid would be highly exceptional. Oh, while talking about Ovid:

Normal: Students love Ovid, because his hexameters are the easiest of all time and the stories are delightful.
Common: Even good Latin teachers consider Ovid just about the most difficult author for students to write an exam about. (In The Netherlands, exams are about different Latin authors each year). Said one colleague: Ovid is really almost too difficult, because one’s grammar has to be so exceptionally good that almost no student can cope.

Normal: In order to make the language part of oneself, students learn to write and, better yet, speak some Latin to at least an extent, even though this is evidently not the primary goal of the Latin course.
Common: Students don’t even read out the mediocre Latin sentences in their beginning textbooks. When the teacher reads out a sentence or two (let alone a whole paragraph!), students don’t listen, because their only task is to “translate” Latin into their own language. Answering even the simplest question in Latin is considered absurdly difficult, speaking Latin something for madmen.

Normal: Students get a fair overview of the Latin literature without explicit or implicit prejudice for an author or a time period.
Common: Students study only a very small amount of texts from a tiny part of Latin literature, rarely older than Cicero or younger than Pliny Minor. Authors like Apuleius, Bede, Erasmus are considered only of interest in translation or for scholarly research at the doctoral level.

Philosophy

A few weeks after I returned to Europe, last Spring, I had to send my condolences twice. A colleague whom I barely knew very sadly gave birth to a baby that had passed away in the whomb a few days earlier. Maybe a week later one of my famous organ teachers, Piet Kee, passed away at a very high (but not high enough) age, after a very productive life of (in alphabetical order) composing, performing, and teaching (of course, I can’t speak about his personal life).

I told the friend I used to hang out with at the time about this strange coincidence. I got a bit philosophical about it, more, I think, than the friend could deal with.

“I’m obviously not going to say this to the mother of the baby,” I said. “But the thing is, no matter how difficult, to believe that the baby’s life is not worth a penny less than Piet Kee’s.”

My friend tried to avoid a fight, I think.

“Hm,” she said. “Not less valuable, perhaps. But less rich, no?”

I tried to put it differently.

“I mean, for reasons we can obviously not fathom, it was their time to go. For both of them, their life was complete.”

My friend almost got angry, but not quite.

“It was,” I tried one more time, “meant to be that way. For both of them.”

I’ll never forget what she said.

“Well, I just think it was terribly bad luck, for that mother,” she said. (If you know Dutch, the expression my friend used was “domme pech.”)

“You can call it that,” I made one last attempt. “Or Fate. Or God. I like that better than ‘bad luck’. Don’t you?”

She didn’t.

How to measure whether a life is complete? Piet Kee counted on at least another ten years, in the footsteps of his equally famous father. What do we know about the life of an almost-nine-month-old? What do we know about the life that was awaiting him (it was a boy)? But it’s our obligation, I think, to believe that the kiddo’s life was no less meaningful, no less important, no less wonderful than Kee’s. Heck, it’s got to be that way, or the whole universe is a joke.

Why Latin?

A while ago I’ve written on this blog about what the goal of Latin in high school might be. Now that I finally managed to get an answer from a colleague, who, I suppose, may be representative for a generation or two of Dutch classicists, I’m writing this short postscript.

The colleague does not believe much in  extensive reading in Latin or for that matter in reading anything in Latin with ease: the more difficult the better, word-for-word translating, speaking Latin in class complete nonsense, after all, it’s a dead language, the whole megillah.

The purpose, then, of learning Latin in school, according to the colleague, is to learn to look at an entirely different society through the eyes of an intellectual. “Reading a novel from the nineteenth century in French or German would do the same,” I tried. No, that’s not a different enough society, countered the colleague.

Well, when reading Martial, I often think of New York in the 1980s. And not to pooh-pooh Ovid, but I wouldn’t call him the greatest intellectual of all time. I love Sallust, but I can think of twentieth-century historians with equally interesting and possibly less biased views on history.

But what about after the exam? The colleague is very clear and open about it: “I don’t expect them to read any Latin after their exams.”

I knew it was that way. I know it’s like that for so many colleagues. I know that many students look forward to throwing away their Latin grammars and dictionaries.

But I find it so, so sad.

I remember how disappointed I was to realize that all those hours of Latin and Greek (way more than we had for the modern foreign languages — after all, we had to keep up the myth that Latin and Greek were unspeakably difficult, even for the happy few of us who took high school at the gymnasium level) — that all those hours had not taught me to read even a relatively simple text in Latin with some ease. (I’m not even mentioning Greek.)

I was so happy to find my way back to both languages many years later and loved learning to read Latin and even Greek with ease, a journey I’m still continuing after ten years. Not because I have to, but because I love it.

I see the occasional student who understands what I’m saying and starts reading, with unheard-of results. I am so grateful to be able to work with such students from time to time.

Why do so few colleagues in The Netherlands want to see how Latin and Greek can pleasant, enjoyable, fun? What are they so afraid of? Freedom?