As some may be aware, a few of us are working on a project entailing a system of leveling texts and creating leveled texts. I'm curious to those of you who have spent some time thinking about this, and especially people who teach actively (involving more of their students' minds than just rote memorization or automatic parsing and declining of every word in sight), if you have thoughts on the complexity levels of various Koine Greek features. What kinds of grammatical structures should be seen and be familiarized with first? What kinds of sentence structures are most common (in real Greek, not contrived textbook Greek)? What kinds of particles are more common and/or easily recognizable/comprehensible? Where do idioms fit in? I'm looking for a broad range of items. I'm also looking for general principles that make sense, rather than what sequence a certain textbook prescribes. I'm not trying to get nitpicky.
For example, here is an excerpt from a description of a leveling system for English books by Fountas and Pinnell:
This goes on to levels Y/Z:A: Characteristics of Texts at Level A:
• Text and concepts highly supported by pictures
• One line of text on each page
• Familiar, easy content
• Repeating language patterns (3‐6 words per page)
• Short, predictable sentences
B: Characteristics of Texts at Level B:
• Text and concepts highly supported by pictures
• Two or more lines of text on each page
• Repeating language patterns (3‐7 words per page)
• Very familiar themes and ideas
• Short, predictable sentences
C: Characteristics of Texts at Level C:
• Familiar, easy content
• Introduction of dialogue (assigned by said in most cases)
• Many sentences with prepositional phrases and adjectives
• Some simple contractions and possessives (words with apostrophes)
• Two to five lines of text on each page
• Some bolded words
• Some ellipses, commas, quotation marks, question marks, and exclamation points
D: Characteristics of Texts at Level D:
• Familiar, easy content, themes, and ideas
• Simple dialogue (some split dialogue)
• Many sentences with prepositional phrases and adjectives
• Some longer sentences (some with more than six words)
• Some simple contractions and possessives (words with apostrophes)
• Two to six lines of text on each page
• Some sentences turn over to the next line
• Some words with –s and –ing endings
• Fewer repetitive language patterns
E: Characteristics of Texts at Level E:
• Familiar content that expands beyond home, neighborhood, and school
• Most concepts supported by pictures
• More literary stories and language
• Concrete, easy‐to‐understand ideas
• Some longer sentences – more than ten words
• Some three‐syllable words
• Some sentences with verb preceding subject
• Variation of words to assign dialogue in some texts (said, cried, shouted)
• Easy contractions
• Mostly words with easy, predictable spelling patterns
• Two to eight lines of print per page
These are very basic principles. What suggestions would you have for Koine Greek?Y/Z: Characteristics of Texts at Levels Y/Z:
• Many texts with the complex structure of adult reading
• Unusual text organizations (flashback, flash forward, time lapses)
• Many new vocabulary words that readers must derive meaning from context or use glossaries or dictionaries
• Many texts presenting multiple themes that may be understood in many layers
• Long stretches of descriptive language that are important to understanding setting and characters Full range of literary devices (for example, flashback, stories within stories, symbolism, and figurative language)
• Some switching from setting to setting, including time change (often unsignaled, or signaled only by dialogue)
• Some very long sentences (more than thirty words)
• Words that offer decoding challenges because they are archaic, come from regional dialect, or from languages other than English
Thanks,