Coming Soon!

Living Biblical Hebrew: A Teacher’s Manual
(available only within BLC Online – Living Biblical Hebrew products)

Brian Schultz
Scott McQuinn
Benjamin P. Kantor

 

Helping you Implement Best Practices from the field of Second Language Acquisition
N.B. In its current draft, this manual covers
the first 28 class hours very nicely.

 

The field of biblical studies is seeing a shift in its pedagogical approach to biblical languages. The last decade has seen a growing awareness that biblical language instruction has not been informed by the advances in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research, to the detriment of student learning. More recently, Bible translation agencies and academic institutions are beginning to require their biblical language programs to adopt an approach that makes extensive use of SLA’s best practices, often referred to as Communicative Language Teaching.

A pioneer in the field with over 20 years of experience, the Biblical Language Center is on the cutting edge of applying SLA’s best practices. Its newly revised Living Biblical Hebrew curriculum for classrooms includes Living Biblical Hebrew: A Teacher’s Manual, making it possible to bring a more complete immersive experience to your students, even if you have not been trained in Second Language Acquisition, nor have the oral fluency in biblical Hebrew such teaching requires.

A Fully Aural/Oral Approach

The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages “recommends that language educators and their students use the target language as exclusively as possible (90% plus) at all levels of instruction during instructional time and, when feasible, beyond the classroom.” This is true even for the “dead languages.”

No Fluency? No Problem!

Because most instructors of biblical languages are not typically trained in oral fluency, they find themselves at an impasse, wishing to do better for their students but hindered by their own limitations. The Biblical Language Center’s A Teacher’s Manual will remove this barrier with its “Classroom Fluency,”™ a way by which instructors can be orally proficient in the language needed to teach the next class session. Furthermore, repeated use of the Biblical Language Center’s “Classroom Fluency”™ is an efficient way to grow one’s genuine fluency in the language.

Immersion Even Outside the Classroom

Additionally, research has determined that the most efficient way to teach reading fluency in a second language is to “increase exposure to spoken language generally.” Thus it is crucial to keep students immersed in the language by providing them with invaluable comprehensible input, principally aural, both in and out of the classroom.

This means that even more important than the written resources a curriculum provides, it must have a solid oral component. The Biblical Language Center’s Living Biblical Hebrew curriculum provides nearly 20 hours of recordings which form the core of its materials, not an optional extra. Furthermore, the bulk of these recordings are ACTFL’s requisite “meaningful communication,” not just vocabulary lists or paradigm lists being read aloud. These recordings of “meaningful communication” form the backbone of the assigned homework, and keep students immersed in the language, even outside the classroom.

Features

In addition to providing instructors with Classroom Fluency™ and students with hours of comprehensible input, A Teacher’s Manual will eventually provide the following resources and tools for the instructor:

    • Teacher Training videos
    • Customizable lesson plans for each hour
    • Learning objectives for each teaching session
    • Detailed description of the activities
    • Logistical notes
    • Prop list for class sessions
    • Pre-made and customizable “cheat-sheets” to use in class while teaching
    • Detailed instructions for the various pedagogical techniques used
    • Teaching tips
    • Scripted scenarios in the target language for each activity
    • Linguistic notes
    • References with all the vocabulary and verb forms you will need to teach each activity
    • Sample syllabus
    • Assigned homework for each session

A Teacher’s Manual is tightly integrated with Living Biblical Hebrew: Foundations and Living Biblical Hebrew: Jonah (beta), which come with over 30% more material than our print textbooks.

Instructors can receive a sample of A Teacher’s Manual today by contacting us at support@biblicallanguagecenter.com!