Reflections on Teaching Ancient Greek as a Living Language 3: Endnotes

Back in January I posted an initial report on Briercrest’s first Intensive Koiné Greek Semester: five immersive courses in a 15-week fall semester, beginning from scratch and culminating in the Greek text of the Gospel of Mark. As I mentioned in that post, the semester was distinguished by its intensive five-days-a-week format and by our approach to teaching Ancient Greek in Ancient Greek as a living language.

Here at last is a follow-up post with a little more detail about what we did in class, our influences, and the resources we used.

The Classroom

The Intensive Semester would not have succeeded the way it did without the outstanding contribution of our three student interns. With five co-teachers, we were able to give attention to each student in a class of about 25 students, and to provide much more active and more engaging learning experiences than we would otherwise have been able to do. In addition to active instruction, role-playing, and “Total Physical Response” exercises from the front of the class, we were able to break into stations with different teachers leading different activities (including WAYK), and to work together in table groups with a different teacher assigned to each table each day. Five co-teachers also meant that we could share tutorial responsibilities in the afternoons after a full morning of class.

About half the class had already taken a semester-based version of the first two courses the previous year, and sat in on the first six weeks for review. Their enthusiasm and basic familiarity with the language helped the brand new students get up to speed.

Influences

Other contributions were less obvious to students, but no less important. The field of active ancient Greek language instruction is changing so rapidly it might not have been possible to offer an intensive semester of Ancient Greek by immersion ten years ago. In any case, we could not have pulled it off without help from others under whom we have studied and whose recently-developed resources we employed.

My colleague, Wes Olmstead, who both organized the Greek semester and shouldered most of the teaching and lesson planning, spent much of the summer of 2019 learning under Christophe Rico at Polis Institute courses in the United States.

In an earlier post I mentioned attending one of the Biblical Language Center's Greek Fluency Workshops in the summer of 2012. Almost a decade later, I can see the formative impact of these workshops (2011-2013) on the growing movement of people involved in living Greek language instruction. The teachers the summer I attended included Randall Buth, Jordash Kiffiak and Ben Kantor. (BLC's plans to restart the workshops in 2020 have moved online, which may make them more accessible. Highly recommended!)

Bryn Olmstead picked up the idea of Greek fluency and ran with it farther than I imagined possible. Although Bryn and Felicia were not physically present to help teach the course, they did a tremendous amount of work behind the scenes throughout the semester, most notably by preparing incredibly effective Keynote slides. Bryn informs me that their contribution was heavily indebted to his teacher, Gonzalo Jerez Sánchez: “Much of what we produced is simply creative adaptation of what we learned from him for your particular situation at Briercrest.”

Resources

It is no coincidence that several of our influences reappear as authors and creators of resources we used.

Much of Koiné Greek I, the first course in the series, was built around:

(1) The Biblical Language Center’s Living Koiné Greek: Foundations “Picture Lessons.”

(2) Jordash Kiffiak's Omilein videos and a pre-publication draft of his workbook, which is designed to be used alongside the BLC “Picture Lessons.”

In my view, Jordash’s ΟΜΙΛΕΙΝ curriculum, with its blend of high-quality TPR videos and a lavishly-illustrated workbook, is currently the best beginning Greek resource available for those who want to lead students through the equivalent of a first semester of Greek using a communicative approach. Jordash now offers online courses through his own ΟΜΙΛΕΙΝ website.

In Koiné Greek II-IV we combined Christophe Rico’s Polis curriculum with the Italian version of the classical Greek textbook, Athenaze:

(3) Christophe Rico, Polis: Speaking Ancient Greek as a Living Language, Level One (Polis Institute Press, 2015).

(4) Balme, Maurice, Gilbert Lawall, Luigi Miraglia, and Tommaso Francesco Bórri. Athenaze: Introduzione al greco antico. Parte I. 2d ed. Montella, Avellino: Accademia Vivarium Novum, 2018. (Why the Italian Athenaze you ask? Consider these answers.)

(5) We also used audio resources produced by Gonzalo Jerez Sánchez of Classics at Home.

(6) As an additional source of comprehensible input in class, we dipped into Seumas MacDonald’s Lingua Graeca per se Illustrata (LGPSI), which provided the inspiration for the map at the beginning of this post.

In these three courses (Koiné Greek II-IV), we made it through chapter 15 of Athenaze, all of Polis Level One, and part of a pre-publication draft of Polis 2.

Our task in Koiné Greek V was to read and talk about the Gospel of Mark in Greek.

(7) Ben Kantor's excellent Koiné Greek Gospel of Mark video was a tremendous help:

By the end of the semester, I had the repeated experience of sitting around a table with students who were helping me explain the Greek text of Mark to each other in Greek. What more could you ask for?

(Note: This is the third in a series of posts on last fall’s Intensive Greek Semester. You can read the first two here and here.)