Teaching Biblical Languages and Childhood Memories

My album of childhood memories contains a snapshot of my father sitting on the porch of our Mombasa home, a stack of Bibles in various ancient and modern languages piled beside his chair. The discipline of multi-lingual daily Bible reading had the dual effect of helping my dad maintain his languages and of opening his eyes to new features of familiar texts.

The "album" also includes mental images of both Mom and Dad teaching English to African students, all of whom would have been working on at least their third or fourth spoken language.

This heritage means that I have always known it is possible to maintain a reading knowledge of a language long after the end of formal instruction, and that I have always had some acquaintance with what is involved in teaching a second language.

Because of this background, it just make sense to me that a "living-language" approach to teaching the Biblical languages would be more efficient (for students) than traditional approaches are. The only real obstacle is the need to develop enough proficiency to be able to teach at maximum efficiency.