Stephen Hughes wrote:If you can get students to a certain level, the text / language itself will become their teacher (and continue to be yours).
Yes, but there's the rub, isn't it? It is just here - 'getting students to a certain level' - where there has been such a dismal failure in Biblical language instruction. No doubt the reasons for the failure are complex and manifold, but phrases like 'pedagogical disaster' are not floating around for nothing. The statistics on those who have taken a year of Greek or Hebrew, and then drop out, only to forget all that they've learned within a few months are rather depressing. If you cannot get students to the level where they have had a significant and meaningful engagement with the text over an extended period of time, then they won't likely survive.
From my own experience I can see one serious impediment which is no doubt obvious to many here, and well understood. The underlying assumption of so many of the grammars and so many intro courses seems to be that you should plow through grammar in a sort of serial fashion until you have enough basic grammar and vocabulary to start reading the text. But when you finally do start reading the text, if you survive that long, you find again and again that
your grammar is not 'robust' enough to describe what you are encountering and the
rules fail you everywhere. What is more, the grammar itself is an impediment, because, as others here have said more eloquently than I could, that's not how you learn a language. You find yourself trying to decode the text with a faulty set of guidelines (so it seems), instead of relating to the text itself. The model is wrong. The method is wrong. Many of the most popular texts are wrong.
I suspect that if the armies of students who have dropped out after the first year had spent that entire year just reading 1John, and being taught grammar and vocabulary from the text they were engaging, they would they would have fared much better in the long run. Many would at least be able to pick up a GNT a couple of months later, and read portions of the text. (Someone oughta write a text that does that!) I know grammar must be taught and learned if you hope to gain any mastery of the language - but the describe-the-language : experience-the-language mix needs to be re-balanced.
You don't need to be native-speaker to teach a language, competent is enough.
Thank goodness, otherwise I would not qualify. It sure does help though, and competency in communication must surely be the goal for serious instructors. The ideal, I think most would agree, is for the teacher to be able to 'handle' the language. That is, if the teacher can communicate even simple sentences and everyday narrative competently, and can begin to teach that from the beginning, the outcome will be better than simply demonstrating one's proficiency in Koine Greek grammar. I personally know of one long time intro Greek instructor who begins each year by informing the bright-eyed hopefuls that he himself cannot communicate in Koine Greek. He has a reputation, though, of being a most exacting individual with respect to the rules of grammar. From where I sit now, that would be the point where I would ask for a refund of my tuition fees. It's no accident that when large organizations engage ESL teachers, they want native speakers. For English they want native speakers of English.
My point is that if the teacher knows the language, the language textbook becomes the tool that it was designed to be.
Of course that's true, but all textbooks are not created equal, nor all teachers for that matter. An outstanding teacher can teach from any textbook, or no textbook, but I suspect the majority will tend to teach the way they were taught, unless they have been seriously challenged. Also, it is the nature of the beast that many will undertake this task on their own without a teacher, for better or for worse. No doubt, if recent history is any indication, Amazon will continue to ship out truckloads of certain popular intro Greek textbooks to students who do not question the method and to teachers whose success rate in getting students through "to a certain level" is not so good.