Paul-Nitz wrote:As far as giving clues, how about establishing meanings with a set form like forcing the next new word to be the last in the previous sentence?
I think it is effective because it still supplies a context for understanding the Greek word to come. In the case of this exercise, the context is generally one English word.
I greatly enjoy talking about this with you and get a lot from your ideas. Now, if you don't mind, let me share three pieces of advice that I got from my teacher trainers; not using pidgin, being prepared for questions, and not making things "too interesting".
One of the most difficult things about being a language teacher is to not create a pidgin or use illogical sentences in the classroom - but admittedly there were people in the 1960's who said that that was a good thing to do. I've underlined a few places where that might be happening.
Paul-Nitz wrote:- Today I rode a horse.
ὁ ἵππος threw me out of his saddle today when I was riding with my sister {1 horse or 3?}.
ἡ ἀδελφή of me was not thrown out of the saddle, but there was a child with us.
τὸ τέκνον almost got thrown off, but was saved by a certain man.
ὁ ἄνηρ came alongside the child {the horse?} and saved it. His {whose?} mother was happy.
ἡ μήτηρ thanked the man profusely and gave him some food.
τὸ βρώματα was a very nice fruitcake she happened to have in her purse {handbag?}.
The story is interesting and graphic. If I were to use it in a class, it would be really hard or me to answer student questions, if any arose.
I know that the verb "to ride" is the perfect / pluperfect forms of ἐπιβεβηκεναι ἐπί (c. acc. / gen. of the animal)
I don't know the word for throwing a rider or for saddle (perhaps ἐπίσαγμα (LXX) - pack-saddle, or ἐφίππιον (Classicall) - saddle cloth, saddle)
Come alongside is a great graphic image but at present I don't know how to express that in Greek using a word that implies aid.
Would "saved" be ἀσφαλίζω or διασῴζω here?
I'm not sure of the word for fruitcake either, but I think I once read about one in Aristophanes (perhaps).
These words presented in these sentences would need a teacher of a much higher callibre than myself to teach them. The idea of this diglot embedding is to give the students the (false) sense that the Greek words are not so foreign, rather than to allow the teacher to be overly expressive. I'm lucky, I teach my mother tongue - the majority of English (language not literature) teachers in the world are teaching English as a foreign language - but I have to bring things down to the students' level.
There is a tendency for teachers to want to include interesting things into the classroom to make the learning go along a bit better, but from a learner's point of view the target language needs to be the focus of attention - and that necessitates that the other things need to be a bit bland. That divesting of elaboration is something that most of trainee ESL teachers that I studied with (including myself) had to go through, and it is something that even an experienced teacher has to be conscious of. Choosing learning aims sticking to them and working towards them is a little boring, but seems to be the best way to get the desired outcomes. The learners should walk away remembering the words rather than the interesting story.
As a student activity, where they know that their classmates are not going to be able to answer questions, it would be great. It could be a restricted activity where students write on the board / say a sentence that ends with an English word, that another student has to recognise from a list (or memory) and then start the next sentence with that. Restricting the activity to a few dozen words would make it workable for students.
Your sentences are really descriptive and graphic. Perhaps you could incorporate visuals along with these sentences in vocabulary instruction together.