The group gathered in Jerusalem’s Old City for over 50 immersion Koine Greek hours, interacting with stories, maps, props, and texts. Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) techniques, such as TPR (Total Physical Response) and TPRS (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling), were employed to prepare the gospel texts which were read on site. Occasional smaller groups led by facilitators allowed for more speaking practice and contextual communication.

The first workshop trip was to the Mount of Olives, where Jesus’ triumphal entry (Lk 19:28-40) and Olivet discourse (Mt 24:3-14) were read and discussed while overlooking the Kidron Valley and the Temple Mount. Jesus’ prayer in the garden of Gethsemane (Mk 14:32-42) was read in an olive orchard on the mountain’s descent.

The second workshop trip was to the southern part of ancient Jerusalem, also known as the City of David. There, at the pool of Siloam, discovered in the past decade, the group read Jesus’ healing of a blind man (Jn 9:1-41). Afterward, the group walked past recent excavations outside of Dung Gate and up through a newly opened tunnel into the Southern Steps of the Temple Mount. Texts associated with Jesus and the Temple (parable of the wicked tenants, cleansing the Temple, taxes to Caesar) were read later and discussed in their historical and cultural context.

The third workshop trip began at the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, where the group entered an underground passageway into a great meeting hall from the Second Temple period. There, Jesus’ trial before the Sanhedrin (Mt 26:57-68) was read in the cavernous, low-lit room. Via tunnel, the group traversed the western face of Herod’s expansion of the Temple Mount, exiting where the great Antonio Fortress once stood. In the lower levels of the Convent of the Sisters of Zion, which still retains the Roman pavement stones from the ancient fortress, the group read Jesus’ appearance before Pilate (Mk 15:1-20). Afterward, the group visited the close-by Pool of Bethesda and read Jesus’ healing of the invalid (Jn 5:1-17).

Beginning with the “Jesus in the Galilee” Koine Greek session (Apr, 2010), and then followed by the first “Greek Instructors Fluency Workshop” in Fresno (Aug, 2011), this recent gathering in Jerusalem was one more step in the Biblical Language Center’s goal of stimulating Koine Greek fluency among the academy and beyond. Moving forward, Fresno will host their second fluency workshop this July, 2012, and there are tentative plans for another Koine Greek workshop in Jerusalem (“Jesus’ Last Week”) with New Testament texts and field trips in March, 2013.

This past SBL conference, a short video clip was shown (a second time – it was first presented at the SBL conference in Atlanta the previous year) as to how it is possible to introduce the ו”ו ההיפוך (conversive waw, narrative waw, etc.) concept to a class using TPR.  Since there have been requests for it, I post it here.

I have been blessed to have my wife Rachel come and teach with me.  Of course, this is not always the case, but a well-prepared TA can fill in just as well.  The use of the scroll (book) is to communicate to the students that we are now dealing with a story, or in other words, a sequence of events.  Since speaking in ו”ו ההיפוך can be a challenge, a scroll has the added advantage that one can use it to hide the correct forms that have been written out and pasted in the scroll/book ahead of time so that one can read them and ensure one does not make a mistake.

Since that clip was filmed, I now introduce the ו”ו ההיפוך somewhat differently.  Rather than repeating the sequence of events the student did using ואחרי כן as a kind of “divider” between the various simple past statements while recalling the events in order, I simply restate the various actions in random order, without having to repeat ואחרי כן each time.  Better yet, I turn to the TA (or the TA to me) and ask what the student did.  Then we will start recalling various actions the student took, in random order.  This justifies our answers being in the simple past tense (קטל), since we are not talking about a sequence of events.  After recalling several of the student’s actions, I can then turn to the students and ask them for more actions performed by the student.  Once all the actions have been recalled (in random order), I then repeat the entire sequence of events, this time using the ויקטול forms.

Of course, the first time I do this drill, I (or my TA and I) have to say several of the actions (in random order) before the students catch on and provide more of them, all in the קטל form.  But if I do the drill a second time immediately right after, the students have already caught on, and when I ask “מה הוא עשה”, I can turn to them directly, and they will start giving me the various actions, hopefully in random order.  To make sure they do, I will sometimes begin by being the first to answer my own question by giving one of the actions that was done in the middle of the sequence.

One big advantage of doing it this way is that it does not require the students to remember how to describe all the actions, or remember in what order they took place.  Even if they remember only a single action, they can still answer the question, and not feel the extra stress of having to say it in the proper order.  Immediately, there is more participation from the students, because the scenario is simpler, easier, and therefore less stressful to them.  All of this boosts learning.

Finally, I find that by the time I do the drill a third or fourth time, using only a limited set of verbs, the students start wanting to produce the ויקטול forms as well, saying them along with me as I retell the sequence of the student’s actions.

One other practical piece of advice.  In the midst of the sequence of events, one can throw in a קטל form to describe some background information.  For example, if in the sequence the student opened a door, before I say “ויפתח את הדלת” (“And he opened the door”), I will say “והדלת הייתה סגורה” ([Now] the door was open).  The students immediately feel the break in the narrative sequence and realize that I am giving background information necessary for the continuation of the sequence of events.  This helps them get a feel for discontinuity in the narrative.

This past fall, after I did that with the קטל and ויקטול forms several times, I decided on the spur of the moment to finish off with a scenario that used the יקטול and וקטל forms.  I asked what I would do, gave a bunch of actions I would do (in random order) using the יקטול forms, then, before doing them, I gave them the entire sequence in the וקטל forms, then did it.  And of course, the students knew immediately what what going on, even though they had never encountered the וקטל previously.

At a more advanced level, one can even turn to the students and ask them to say what the student will do in the יקטול forms.  When the students have suggested a sufficient number of actions, I as a teacher will give the sequence of actions the student will do them in, or prompt the class to come up with the order, using the וקטל forms.  Thereafter, I will command the student to do them in the agreed order.  (Optionally, one can even describe the actions as the student does them.)  After the student has done them all, I will then ask the class to tell me what the student did, their answers being in the קטל form, making sure that they are out of order (to ensure it, I will very quickly throw in an out-of-order one if I see they are going in order), and finally, I will summarize everything in order again using the ויקטול forms.

Of course, one can do variations on this drill by having a male student do the sequence of events, a female student, several students, oneself, etc.

If you have other ideas about how to effectively teach the ו”ו ההיפוך, I would love to hear of them.  Similarly, if you try to teach it using my suggestions above, I would like to hear how it went.

One thing is for sure, it is so much more fun for the students to learn in this way.  It is also way more fun for the teacher to teach in this way.

It is nice to be reading a fifth edition. That says that there has been some previous usefulness and that the author/publisher is trying to keep up. More germane to the BLC blog is reflecting on the basic psychological reading processes that Frank Smith describes. Basically, he warns that if reading is done too slowly comprehension will fail. The brain needs the input of many pieces quickly or else the very short term memory drops them and comprehension is blocked. This short time is measured in just a few seconds.

Maybe we can illustrate this with an easy experiment. Take a sentence 12-20 words long. Put each word on a separate piece of paper. Then read each word and turn the page to read the next word. Frank Smith is saying that when we get to the last page our comprehension will have dropped into a very poor or negligible range. This can be done right now, too, without multiple pieces of paper. Take one piece of paper with a slit that is big enough for about 7-10 letters, go down two or three paragraphs on this blog and start reading where you only let one word become visible at a time. Alternatively, as briefly as possible, glance away between each word. Or simply pronounce each word by itself before going to the next word. How is comprehension, or its lack thereof?

That observation of needing basic fluency for good reading comprehension has a ring of truth. However, it raises several questions when one considers second language acquisition.

First of all, it implies to me that reading at the ‘speed of speech’ or faster is a necessary goal of a good reading program.  Reading slower than such a speed will guarantee extreme inefficiency and/or poor to dismal comprehension.

However, once we accept the goal of good comprehension and a decent reading speed, we face another hurdle. How do we explain what goes on in most ancient language classrooms? How do they process a sentence of disjointed parts? Apparently a reader in a second language who does not have sufficient vocabulary and structural mastery to read long stretches of text on the fly must re-read and build several modules of ‘medium-term’ memory. That is, a person must use a lot of processing energy to put a word or structure into a retrieval capability and then re-read a sentence/passage several times, building up various pieces until a satisfying comprehensive sense is obtained and the reader can move on. Wow, just describing such a process is tiring and such a process still does not guarantee good comprehension.

Professor Smith is not directly concerned in this book with the questions that I raise for second language acquisition, nor did he describe the paragraph above. However, it seems a reasonable extrapolation from what I’ve been reading. And it underlines a basic idea that such a collapsing, approach to reading with multiple starts on each sentence should not be called ‘reading’ and is no way to appreciate a literature. To borrow Anna Phillip’s imagery from her SBL presentation in SF: she talked about taking a text, a cup of warm cocoa, and getting comfortable near a fireplace on a wintery day. That pleasurable image probably represents what many students would like to achieve when then begin to study a foreign language with a goal of reading the literature. That is probably the goal, or should be the goal, of any who want to read a canonical text, the Hebrew Bible, the Greek New Testament, or any highly valued literature.

Well, Frank Smith’s book doesn’t answer the question of how to attain such reading speeds, reading comfort, and better comprehension in a second language. It simply points out that speed is a necessity. Those who have been working with BLC are already aware that we take such goals seriously. It is certainly true that rapidly interacting in an oral environment leads to improved senses of reading. This underlines the answer to a question that we receive over and over–”if reading is the goal, why does BLC demand listening and speech?” Ans: “We talk alot in biblical Hebrew, in class and in recordings, because we want everyone to be good readers. People need to process a language at the speed of speech to be good readers.”

(Since a few of you requested them, below are my notes that I had in front of me when I presented my paper at the ETS and SBL Annual Meetings on how to take first steps in Communicative Language Teaching.)

What is CLT (Communicative Language Teaching)?

Teaching the target language in the target language:

1. Using the target language to communicate meaning to the students.
2. Getting the students to use the language in order to learn the language.

 Why CLT?

1. It fits multiple learning styles,
2. It is more fun for the students.
3. It results in longer retention of the language.
4. It builds a foundation that will allow the student to go BOTH faster and further in learning the language in the long run.

Three ways to start – from easiest to hardest.

1. Add CLT homework into the curriculum, even if you don’t change anything else.
2. ‘Class commands’ components of teacher-student interface.
3. Run a Total Physical Response (TPR) based class.

(Note that since I teach biblical Hebrew, the following will be illustrated with biblical Hebrew examples, though many of the principles apply to Koine Greek just as well.)

1. Include CLT homework

 What is CLT homework?

It is any kind of homework that, as per the definition of CLT, seeks to communicate meaning to the student in the target language, without using translation.

1. Beginners CLT homework does not need to be adapted to a particular curriculum, and as such can be used in all classes regardless of curriculum.
2. It can be used with at both the beginners and intermediate levels.
3. It can be assigned at various levels of intensity.

Unfortunately, there are precious few resources out there: to my knowledge, Biblical Language Center’s “Living Biblical Languages” self-study material is the only one being marketed right now. It can be used alongside any beginners or intermediate level courses.

 Value of CLT Homework

1. Students find it fun. It can be a great break from otherwise dreaded vocab lists and paradigm learning.
2. Focuses on meaning, not analyzing form: communicates to the student that it is possible to get 100% meaning from language even if one cannot analyze it perfectly.
3. Engages a different part of the brain in the learning process, and as such reinforces and strengthens the learning process.
4. Demonstrates that language is a ‘tool’ of communication, not an ‘object of study’.

2. Use “Class Commands”

 What do I mean by “Class Commands”?

• All “teacher – student” interaction in the class room, whatever the teacher does to conduct class.
• Examples: “Open your books”, “Look at the board”, “Read example #1″, etc.

 Value of “Class Commands”

1. As with CLT homework, use of Class Commands demonstrates that language is a ‘tool’ of communication, not an ‘object of study’.
2. In addition, it models communication in a non-artificial, “real-world” context. Gives it a sense of being a real bona fide language.
3. Focuses is on meaning, not analysis of language. It is important for students to realize that language can be used (and enjoyed) without the analytical processes we typically require of our students to “access the meaning”.

For example, if I use פתחו את ספריכם (open your books), I don’t have to point out what characteristics of the command make it a 3mp for my students to be able to access its meaning and obey the command.

 Challenge: nomenclature of modern items

How does one call a “pen, pencil” in BH? Or the white board? Not to mention a power point projector.  Two options:

 1) Use modern Hebrew.

• There is no problem adding vocabulary terms to a language. It does not do violence to a language. Languages do it all the time.
• In addition, all of the morphology of modern Hebrew transfers back into biblical Hebrew, so that one should not be fearful that incorporating the occasional “modernism” will hinder or interfere with the learning of biblical Hebrew.
• One caution: vocabulary can change over time.

For example, in modern Hebrew, one says תודה for “thank you”, while in the Bible this is the proper name for a type of sacrifice, and we have no record of it being used as a way of saying thank you. אני מודה לך is better Biblical Hebrew.

 2) Find biblical terms that are close.

• Restrict oneself to that.
• Helps students enter into the world of the Bible.

Example: a ‘writing utensil’ can be the stylus or עט that was the tool used by scribes to write or engrave.

==> for those of you teaching Koine Greek, your corpus of the language is so much larger that you do not face the same vocabulary restrictions as in BH. You may, however, face the difficult task of finding what was the word used, as there is no English to Koine Greek dictionaries.

3. TPR (Total Physical Response)

•  Undoubtedly the best way to get started is to experience it for oneself.
• In the absence of such, here are some guidelines.

 Basic principles of CLT from SLA

Main conclusion of Second Language Acquisition is that we learn and internalize our 2nd, 3rd, etc, language best by mimicking the way one has learned one’s mother tongue:

1. Listening before any production or reading of the language.
2. In order for them to listen, they will need lots of live “comprehensible input”.
3. Physical movement is key to the learning process.

The solution for incorporating these three principles is Total Physical Response (TPR), “discovered” by the psychologist James Asher from San Jose State University about half century ago.

 What is TPR?

Giving commands to which students respond with actions.

1. It bypasses the need for students to production.
2. It quickly builds up the recognition of a significant amount of vocabulary, and
3. It begins the process of internalizing verbal forms and other grammar of the language.

Note: lest anyone think that CLT is only about TPR, TPR is only the beginning stage of CLT, good for a few weeks at most on its own, though one should continue to use it in conjunction with other teaching methods.

 Challenges of TPR

While on the surface TPR seems really easy, it is actually quite challenging.  Two of the biggest challenges are:

1. Keeping it lively and flowing, without awkward pauses.
2. Keeping tabs of your where each of your students is at.

This means that in your effort to do these two things, otherwise simple Hebrew will become more challenging, because in order to do it well, you have to be able to do it in your subconscious. Few instructors can speak biblical Hebrew “subconsciously”.

The key is preparation.

Preparing for TPR

Unless you feel completely fluent in speaking the language, it is important to work through exactly what you will do during the class period, both in terms of content and your own preparedness.

• The goal of a TPR session is to teach a new set of vocabulary.
• You can aim at about 20 vocal words per hour session
• The goals of what you choose to teach can vary

1. Teach vocabulary in order of frequency in the biblical text
2. Teach the vocabulary according to the need of your curriculum or text(s) that you would like the students to read
3. Teach the core vocabulary of the language – that which gets used most often in normal speech. If a student becomes competent in the core of the language (in the same way that a child naturally does in their mother tongue), it is easier to continue building on it in the future.

 1. Compile a list of all the vocab you intend to use

• Think of all the vocab you want to teach for a specific class. This will include the action verbs as well as the nouns you would like to teach
• You can aim at 20 new words per class time
• For action verbs, it is often good to teach vocabulary that relates. Examples include

1. Open and close
2. Stand and sit
3. Go and come
4. Etc

• Think which combinations of these can flow well together. These create “mini scenarios” that can build on each other.

1. For example, opening and closing a door may go well with going out and coming in.
2. Similarly, opening and closing a white board marker may go well with write and erase.
3. By making such combinations, you are teaching the same vocab (open and close) in different contexts. Interacting with a term in a multiplicity of contexts is particularly effective for internalization a language.

• An example of a longer scenario may include walking, sitting, standing, opening and closing doors, touching things, pointing to things, going in and out of a room.
• For vocabulary words, you want a combination of that which is common in the language or texts you eventually want to study AND that which is practical to interact with. If I happen to find a nice stuffed animal – for example I’ve found a nice Dori fish (from Finding Nemo) – I will use it by default, rather than talk about a lion for which I do not have a prop.
• Remember you can be very creative: Lego blocks can build a city, or a tower, or a house, etc. A blue cloth can be a sea, a chair covered in a brown cloth can be a mountain, etc. Masking tape on the floor can be a road, or a map, etc.
• PROPs are very important to the learning process; never assume you can achieve the same results without props.
• Examples of prop usage:
• To teach give-take: have actual objects that are given and taken
• To teach על endings: have objects to place on people and ask “on whom is the fish?”, etc.
• A useful verb to teach more vocabulary is “point to” (…הורה ל)

2. Double check all the forms

• For nouns, make sure you have masculine and feminine forms of the plural down
• חרב is feminine, even if it does not have a ה or ת ending.
• The plural of שולחן is שולחנות, not שולחנים, even though it is masculine
• For verbs, make sure you know the forms of the imperatives, especially those rarely used feminine plural
• Depending at what stage you are at, you may also want to compile the forms for the present and the past, so that can describe what you or the student is doing, as well as what you or the student did.
• Beware of the following possible errors

1. Sometimes the correct form is not what the paradigm would predict. “It was heavy” is not “haDavar kaved” as many paradigm charts suggest, but “haDavar kavad”. Similarly, the pi’el verb “he paid” is not “hu shilem” as in modern Hebrew, but “hu shilam”.
2. Make sure you have the proper prepositions that collocate with the verb. For example, a couple summers ago, someone shared with me the popular “the boy who cried wolf” story that had been published in simple biblical Hebrew, but the title actually meant “the boy who convened (or invited) a wolf”

• Note that while it is good to know all the forms (or have access to them on a “Cheat Sheet” – see below), one should not aim at teaching all the forms of a verb or tense at the same time. Rather, one may want to teach only a single form, two or three at most, and do so in a context that requires “real communication”. Rattling of forms is not what we do when we want to communicate with someone. Asking “What did John/Sue/they do?” after John and Sue (students in the class, or characters on a drawing or video clip) have done something is already closer to a real communicative situation.

 3. Make a scenario

• Probably the biggest challenge is coming up with the scenarios that most effectively allow the student to deduce meaning.
• This is not so much a challenge at the beginning stages with very simple words.
• At later stages, however, it can make or break your teaching session.
• To teach a new word/concept, the scenario needs to be completely comprehensible to the students, and must make the new word/concept as simple and obvious as possible.
• Unfortunately, this can only be learned with practice, so I can’t offer any practical advice.

 4. Make a “cheat sheet”

• Write it in such a way that it can be used as a quick reference, in case you draw a blank while teaching, and need to refresh your memory about a certain word or verb form.
• Write out the entire scenario – in a worse case situation, you can just read it to conduct your class.

 5. Practice

With practice, the language becomes more and more second nature, making the process easier and easier.

 Appendix:

A most useful tool – the Even Shoshan concordance

A most practical tool, the only one that gives you all of the following in a “single glance” (not even the electronic Bibles can do all of the following in a single glance).

1. How many attestations of the word/root
2. All the different forms found in the Bible
3. If the forms are pausal or not
4. If the forms are early or late biblical Hebrew (assuming one knows which texts are early or late)
5. Gives a list of the different collocations the word may have, be it with other nouns, verbs, prepositions
6. Other words in the basic same semantic domain
7. Divides the attestations into groups according to the different definitions the word may have (definitions are given in biblical and/or modern Hebrew)

Here is an original recording of the song sung by the author, Sharon Alley, in October 2009.  She wrote ΤΟ ΣΟΜΑ while team-teaching Biblical Greek with Gary Alley at Nyack College Manhattan Campus during the 2007-2008 school year.

More recently, Daniel Streett has posted a recording of ΤΟ ΣΟΜΑ sung by his teaching assistant.

The lyrics, as have already been posted, are as follows:

ΤΟ ΣΟΜΑ
© Sharon Alley

ὁ χορός:

πόδες, χεῖρες, κεφαλή
ὦμοι, ὦτα, στόμα
ὀφθαλμοί, κοιλία, ῥίς
πάντα ἔχει σῶμα

πρώτη στροφή:

ἅπτομαι τοῦ στόματος
νῦν ἐπαίρω χεῖρας
ἅπτομαι καὶ τῆς ῥινός
δείκνυμι τοὺς πόδας

ὁ χορός:

πόδες, χεῖρες, κεφαλή
ὦμοι, ὦτα, στόμα
ὀφθαλμοί, κοιλία, ῥίς
πάντα ἔχει σῶμα

δευτέρα στροφή:

τοῖς ὠσὶν ἀκούω σου
τύπτω ταῖς χερσί μου
βλέπω σε τοῖς ὀφθαλμοῖς
τρέχω τοῖς ποσίν μου

Below is a video of Sharon herself singing the song with several of the participants at BLC’s “With Jesus in the Galilee” in March 2010.  She is the third from the left in blue jeans.  The group is standing on the reconstructed stage of the roman theater at Sepphoris.  Behind them is the Beth Netofa valley over which sits the village of Cana (just off the screen to the left along the ridge in the distance).  In addition to hearing the song, one can also see the actions that accompany the singing.

Please excuse the poor footage – coughing, wind noise, an israeli speaking on her phone, camera shaking, etc. – just pretend it is for the sake of giving it an more authentic feel!  :-)

Last year I interviewed a few of my students to get their thoughts about my biblical Hebrew course taught using Communicative Language Teaching.  The one student had the following comment:

Learning Hebrew has been easier, so far as to say that I don’t translate it.  Like when I was learning French, I would translate it from French into English to be able to form a sentence.  But now in Hebrew, I kind of just do it all directly in Hebrew, [be]cause I don’t know the English.

(For the record, her mother tongue is English.)  This is the difference between knowing about a language and internalizing the language.  In the latter, there is a communicative process happening in the language (=biblical Hebrew) itself, without the intermediary of one’s mother tongue.

And then this past week, I was helping another one of my first semester Hebrew students with his homework, and at some point to get him to understand what I was trying to explain, I asked him: “?אָכַלְתָּ [Did you eat?].”  And he said in response: “?אָכַלְתָּ [Did you eat?] That means… Oh yes, it means !אָכַלְתִּי [I ate]“  Such a beautiful example of how the language was working in his head as a communicative process, not as a translation process.  His first response was not to find the English equivalent to my question to be able to figure out the correct response in Hebrew.  Rather, his natural response was to communicate in the language, before translating it.

After all, language is all about communicating.

I don’t know how I missed it until now, but a couple weeks ago Fresno Pacific University posted its own independent account of the workshop.   Wayne Steffen (editor of FPU’s Pacific magazine) conducted his own interviews of a couple participants to get a sense of what took place and the impact it had on those who attended.  You can read the article here.

I would like to continue working on this chart to refine it, and would therefore appreciate any feedback you could give me on how I can improve it.

Though I was not aware of it at the time, Daniel Streett had also just written his own blog entry comparing how one reads in one’s mother tongue (or in another language in which one is fluent) with how many students, and most of their instructors as well, read Koine Greek.  Daniel’s observations are worth reading, because if indicative of the situation ‘on the ground,’ they illustrate how current biblical language pedagogy is falling short of its intended purpose: to impart the ability to read the Bible fluently.

Frank Smith is one of the foremost psycholingists of our day.  Much of his work has focused on ‘reading instruction,’ looking at the seemingly simple question of “how does one read” and its implications for teaching people how to read.  This topic is particularly relevant for us teaching biblical languages, since our stated goal is that our our students may learn to read the Bible.  Just this last week I finished reading a collection of his essays entitled “Unspeakable Acts, Unnatural Practices.”  One of the book’s purposes is to expose flaws in the “system” (government, schools, etc.) that hinder or even work against the application of sound principles for reading instruction, and is in many ways irrelevant to my pedagogical concerns about how to teach biblical languages.  But a significant portion relates to the psychology of reading which is applicable to any age and any language, and therefore highly relevant to my interests.

One of the key statements I underlined is the following:

Words in meaningful sequences are the most important elements in reading, not letters or sounds.  Words are the smallest independent meaningful units of written language—and even they gain most of their meaning from larger units they are embedded in, such as phrases and sentences (pp. 32–3).

Stated differently, words have meaning in context, as part of a larger whole.  It is almost as if independent words are meaningless.  All the more reason then, Smith states, that phonetics, the breaking down of the words into syllables, does not work.  “Reading by sounding out is impossible.  Sounding out is the ultimate unspeakable act” (p. 42).  Why?  Because “the purpose of reading is not to produce sounds of words, but to understand their meaning” (p. 42)  Teaching reading (ie the process of getting meaning from written texts) through phonetics is flawed at its core: “false, logically and linguistically” (p. 40), and thus a “handicap, not a help, to reading” (p. 41).  Smith is not against all phonetics or claiming that phonetics have no value: it is a tool to assist a different skill called reading, not the vehicle that enables or leads to reading.  As with syllables, even ”[w]ords are not learned by rote, one at a time, when they are as meaningless as [individual] letters.  They are learned when they make sense” (p. 43).  Much in the same way that individual syllables are meaningless on their own, so are words without their context.

A common objection to Smith’s view (and others doing similar research) is that phonetics are indispensable for learning new words one encounters when reading.  Not so, he explains:

How do we get meaning of an unfamiliar word before we even try to say it?  The answer is that meaning comes from the context in which the word occurs.  Words we do know indicate the meaning of the word we don’t know…  There is substantial evidence that readers quickly become extremely proficient at attributing the correct meaning to unfamiliar words in the normal course of reading…  Children from the second year of their lives accurately infer the meaning of new spoken words about twenty times a day, with no forgetting—both from the language itself and the situation in which it occurs…  Researchers have found that ‘fast mapping’ of a tentative meaning takes place on the first encounter with a new word, and half a dozen more encounters suffice to round out the conventional meaning—with no ‘feedback’ beyond the context in which the word occurs  (pp. 55–8).

It seems to me that there are several conclusions we need to draw from this research for our teaching of biblical languages, and I will mention four that come immediately to mind.

I.  The importance of teaching the language in context.  The “vocab lists” students are often required to memorize is probably the worst offender of this principle.   There are two problems I see with vocab lists that provide a translated gloss that students are expected to memorize.

1. The first is that this is not the way we as humans retain language.  The reason kids can remember (without memorization) up to twenty new words a day is because they perceived the meaning of those words in a comprehensible context.  Contrast to the typical biblical language class: students memorize hundreds of vocabulary words, only to have them vanish from memory faster than it took them to “learn” them.  So when one compares kids learning a language to such students, it is no wonder we think kids have a natural advantage in language learning.  In fact, I have read that adults learn languages faster, so long as the learning takes place in a comprehensible context.  The issue is not kids vs adults, but one of context vs absence of context.
2. Second, the words are de facto being attributed a range of meaning (also called a semantic range) that is determined by the learner’s first language, rather than allowing the target language itself to demonstrate what that particular word’s range of meaning is.  Worse, it robs the student an opportunity to practice that innate ability to figure out—Smith’s “fast mapping”— what the semantic range of a particular word is, if not suppressing it altogether.  In such a case, the student ceases to interact with meaning communicated in the target language, but is only dealing with a kind of transference of meaning onto the target language from their primary language.

II.  Meaning does not come from parsing.  In the same way that reading is not breaking down a sentence into words and syllables,  so meaning is not found the breaking down of words into their roots and declensions.   To be sure, parsing is an important aspect of being able to analyze a language, but it is not a precursor to accessing meaning, nor even a way to ward off incorrect meaning.  One can get to meaning without any parsing whatsoever, because meaning comes from context.  The French todler who hears the phrase “Donne-moi la balle” for the first time certainly does not have to determine that the verb is from the first group of -er ending verbs, that it is in the imperative, and that it is in the second person singular form, before figuring out that he should throw the ball.  All that terminology is key for talking about the language, but not for accessing meaning.  If our goal is getting meaning from what we read, what does it matter if one is able to recognize that a verb follows the “third declension” or is called a polel?  This contributes precious little to understanding what is being communicated by the text.  I suggest therefore that parsing should be ‘back-ended’ in our instruction, explained only after the concept has been internalized through practice.

III.  In order to teach the language effectively, we need a multiplicity of resources  that can provide students with comprehensible contexts at their level.  In the same way that a toddler does not learn to read by jumping directly into a Mark Twain novel, it is just as unreasonable that we consider the Bible as our student’s first reader.  We need a multiplicity of readers for our students that follow their natural progression as they internalize the language.

IV.  Finally, and this is the most contradictory to current practice of the Grammar-Translation method, our students should learn to read on material they have already internalized, readings in which all the words are already familiar to them.  My suggestion is to use materials like BLC’s volume 1 of  “Living Biblical Hebrew” and “Living Koine Greek” where students internalize the language aurally only (not by reading or translation), and that once they have internalized it, they then learn to read using texts that contain only what they have already internalized.  In the case of volume 1 of the Living Biblical Languages, it means that once they are at the stage of internalizing the later, more advanced lessons, they can begin learning to read by going over the printed text of the audio they heard when internalizing the earlier lessons.   (These texts can be found at the end of the book.)  There is an added benefit to doing it this way.  Not only have they internalized all the words that they will be learning to read, they also have the benefit of a recording that can correct their pronunciation.  It is not as good as a parent or personal tutor that can listen to the student and correct their reading when needed, but it is certainly a huge improvement over not providing any way for students to check if their reading is correct or not.  Smith would approve!  “How do we get the correct pronunciation?  Either someone tells us how the word is pronounced at a helpful time, or we subsequently hear the word spoken and make the connection to the word we have encountered in our reading” (p. 58).

These are my thoughts.  Do any of you have any other advice, either from reading theory or from your own experience?

In one sense, the distinction between modern and biblical Hebrew is somewhat artificial.  Much of biblical Hebrew is found in modern Hebrew unchanged.  I’ve heard it said, for example, that all the morphology of modern Hebrew is found in biblical Hebrew. (E.g., the shape of the word רָאִיתִי ‘I saw’ is the same in both.)  So in one sense, it is inconsequential if I do end up talking about “cat” in my class using the word currently used in modern Hebrew, because by doing so I am not undoing or contradicting anything a student would have to learn to know good biblical Hebrew; I am just adding to it.  Still, keeping the two distinct is a good exercise.

Thus, I have two questions:

1. Was there anything in the video clip that was not biblical Hebrew, that I should avoid using in the future?
2. In several instances, I “suppressed” my inclination to use modern Hebrew and used an alternative that is more in line with biblical Hebrew.  How many of these instances are there, and what are they?  What would have been the common way to express it in modern Hebrew?  Is there an even better way to express the thought in biblical Hebrew than the one I used? Or what other biblical options are available?

Let me know what you think.  And since this is the BLC’s blog, I’ll get Randall to weigh in on the responses as well.