I am responding to a posting earlier today by Mr. Andrew Miles of Sydney,
Australia, because I would like to say a word to all friends of Latin who,
in recent days, have participated in the Latinteach discussions on language
learning and language teaching methodology. It seems to me that the
ongoing debate in our profession about the merits of living-language
teaching methods applied to Latin can make little progress until some
fundamental misconceptions about spoken Latin are laid to rest.

I do not claim, in my remarks below, to speak for all who use oral Latin as
a classroom tool or for others whose names have come to be widely
associated with the idea of doing so. That said, I am confident most of
them would agree that speaking Latin in the classroom is not an end in
itself but, rather, a uniquely effective means to the goal which has been
the primary objective of all Latin teaching since the end of antiquity:
reading Latin literature. To paraphrase a colleague's pithier expression,
"living Latin" is ultimately not about learning to speak, it's about
speaking to learn. *

Mr. Miles wrote that he sees little value in teaching students to ask for
directions, to "[order] a caffe latte in some trendy cafe," or in having
them "[practice] dialogues about what sport or hobbies [they] like." It
may surprise him and others to learn that I agree. I don't know of a
single coffeeshop in the world where I could saunter in, utter a
well-turned "Des mihi quaeso caffeam cum lacte," and expect to get my order
filled without a lot of delay, considerable gesticulating, and not a few
smiles. Just after his posting, my good friend and learned colleague
Brennus Legranus of the UK wrote in to say that one valid goal of oral
Latin exercises is to help students communicate with other Latin speakers.
I certainly agree with Brennus that conversing with others can be
wonderfully educational and a great deal of fun, but the sad fact is that
there are precious few people available to talk to with any frequency. It
has been estimated that there are only some 3,000 people on the planet
right now who can really carry on a conversation in Latin, and it is
difficult to get more than a couple of hundred of them together at a time,
even at international conventions like the ALF. If, therefore, the value
of oral exercises were functional -- that is, if their value and legitimacy
consists in that they equip students to communicate with nations-ful of
other individuals who use the same language - then I would find it very
difficult (pace tua, Brenne carissime!) to justify their use in the Latin
classroom generally.

So why use oral exercises at all? Allow me an excursus. Here in the
United States, even mediocre schools' French programs (for example) devote
many class hours every term to oral practice, although the vast majority of
students will never travel to a French-speaking country, ask where to go
for breakfast, order a cafe-au-lait, or chat up a native about football
scores. I don't have any hard statistics to quote, but it seems optimistic
to suppose that 15% in a given class actually will go to France in a timely
manner and use what they have learned. That's not quite 5 in 30 students.
So if only 5 are actually going to put their oral classwork to practical
use, what's the point? Why do our French-teaching colleagues waste the
time of the other 25, when they could be doing something much more
stimulating, such as reading "a good battle, myth or other meaty chunk," in
this case perhaps a life of Napoleon or some stories from La Fontaine?

The obvious answer is that, of course, that's not why they do it. Their
primary goal as teachers is to give their students mastery of the language.
Mr. Miles wrote that as Latin teachers "our aims, objectives and outcomes
are quite different." Are they really? Should they be? Our outcomes,
alas, are often all too different, since most French students after 4 years
can actually read French. But our objectives? No, dear colleagues and
friends, they do not differ a jot. They are one and the same. The proper
goal of language teaching is mastery of the language to the greatest extent
it can be achieved, whether that language be French, Japanese, Latin or
Sanskrit.

Our colleagues in the French Department know that mastery comes when the
student has internalized the language. They understand that internalizing
happens through classroom communication; through experiences that
intimately, directly, and frequently involve the hearing and speaking
faculties. Internalizing requires quick, immediate exchanges;
communication that promotes thinking in French, without recourse to
English. This principle is equally valid in Latin instruction, because, as
we all know from personal experience as babies and young children, all
human beings learn language by speaking and hearing. Reading (let alone
translating!) is, by comparison, a very high-level, abstract skill. We
don't even attempt anything as elementary as "Sam ran. Ann ran. Sam and
Ann ran." (a line I remember from my 1st grade reader) until we've lived
through about 5 or 6 years of total-immersion English! The brain of a
13-year-old Latin One student is certainly much more developed than that of
a 6-year-old first-grader, but the two can still be compared because the
13-year-old starts out well below the functional level of a 6-year old in
terms of knowledge of the language.

When a French teacher drills a student on a sentence such as "S'il vous
plait, je voudrais un cafe au lait," what he is really doing is drilling
the student on the use of the conditional "voudrais", on correct
conjugation "JE voudrAIS", on polite expression (certainly used in written
as well as oral French), and on correct contraction of the preposition A
with the masculine article (AU lait, not A LE lait) . When it comes to
Latin, even if we grant no value to learning a Latin word for coffee on the
grounds that coffee is never mentioned in Cicero or Virgil, still, the
little Latin sentence I used above, "des mihi quaeso caffeam cum lacte"
reinforces the hortatory subjunctive used for polite command, the dative as
indirect object, the accusative and ablative case forms and functions.
Moreover, it connects all these elements in an associative framework that
will help the student remember them, since human memory works by
association. Plainly, even something as "trite and trivial" as a simple
request for a cup of coffee can contain some pretty meaty grammar. How
then can such exercises truly be trivial, or irrelevant to reading skills?

I have even greater difficulty understanding Mr. Miles' statement that he
believes in, and tests his students on, pronunciation and fluency "for
reasons largely unrelated to speaking." To what extent can speaking and
pronunciation be unrelated? Is not pronunciation simply one element of
speaking? Extemporaneous or even scripted speaking is certainly different
from reading something off a page with correct pronunciation, but practice
in the former cannot help but contribute to the latter.

I would be manifestly wrong if I claimed it is impossible to learn to read
Latin without using oral exercises, since there are numerous proofs to the
contrary out there: scholars and teachers, like Mr. Miles himself, who have
a fluent and subtle appreciation for the written Latin word. All those of
us who teach have known or have taught a few outstanding students who could
read extremely well and yet do not speak. But for every one of these, how
many others have we lost? How many talented kids have we seen quitting
after only a few weeks, or getting bored after a year or two and moving on
to something they can internalize and really make their own - such as
French or Spanish? What we call the traditional method can work tolerably
well for the 50% of our class which is composed of visual learners (indeed,
extremely well for the top 2% of these), but what about the rest? What
about the auditory and kinesthetic learners, whose primary learning modes
are so rarely and scantily addressed? Correctly applied oral exercises in
the Latin classroom can help these historically underserved students, while
also offering the visual learners "cross-training", a concept whose
efficacy has been amply proven in the world of professional sports.

At length (ne diutius abutar patientia vestra!) I'll conclude with a line
from the beginning of Mr. Miles' posting. He opined that "Latin teachers
should not try to ape modern language teaching methodology." Certainly
"ape" is a sad choice of word, since it implies dumb mimicry by creatures
incapable of understanding the consequences of their actions. After so
many, many words of mine, I hope at least this much is clear: neither I nor
anybody else involved in Living Latin is in favor of "aping" anything.
SALVI's aim, in particular, is to encourage Latin teachers to seek out and
apply the best available language teaching methods to their work,
regardless of the language for which such methods were originally
conceived. We are working to help restore in our own time the
methodological tradition that was the norm in Europe for centuries before
us - the same tradition that produced the great classicists of the
Renaissance, and which, incidentally, far antedates the translation-based
approach now commonly called "traditional." For all these reasons, in a
spirit of friendship and collegiality, I'll take this opportunity to offer
Mr. Miles a new look at what spoken Latin can do in a classroom by inviting
him to participate in SALVI's "Rusticatio Californiana" immersion Latin
seminar this coming August as our guest, free of charge for lodging, meals,
and course expenses. I look forward to receiving his reply, as I offer my
most respectful greetings to all readers of Latinteach.

Nancy Llewellyn
President, SALVI

*a quote from Prof. John Rassias of Dartmouth College, a member of SALVI's
Advisory Board. I don't know if it's original to him.