One of the big questions that always comes up for people new to the idea of CI (and, if we're being honest, probably to the people who do it a lot, too) is with regard to sheltering. I have yet to see a textbook (actually, the only book in Latin that I have seen that does this is one that was pointed out by Bob Patrick - it's Tres Ursi, a Latin version of the three bears) that effectively keeps vocab down but goes hog wild with the grammar.
We have this concept that students will not understand what we're saying if we use grammar they don't know. There is only a certain degree to which that's true. But they absolutely won't understand if we use a lot of vocabulary they don't know. People don't have the ability to truly absorb thirty-five vocabulary words in a day or two. They just don't. And when we start throwing around stories and lectures and texts and such that are chock full of words they don't know, we lose them. The textbook I use introduces words like swamp once and then never uses them again, forcing kids either to go hunting in the dictionary or, at the minimum, to interrupt their reading to look at the glossary at the bottom of the page. Swamp is a fabulous word! But it's not repeated enough, it's not relevant to what they're doing, and so all it really serves to do is disrupt them.
That said...
I started using relative clauses with my ones this year because, frankly, I don't know how to speak effectively without them. A kid asked me to gloss qui once, and after that, it didn't really seem to bother them. At no point did I tell them that it's masculine, singular and nominative and has to agree in gender and number but not in case with its antecedent. A, they don't understand that, and B, they don't care.
I also ask them frequently, "Intellegisne quid significet...?" They - who know the word significat - haven't actually noticed yet that significat has a vowel change because they know all the words in that sentence. They legitimately don't notice, and so they don't care.
If there's some subtlety implied by the grammar - a tense change, a 'we should' implication - that will impact their actual comprehension, I point it out. I'll gloss it for them (in the case of the 'should' implication) or I'll give them a simple hand gesture to indicate that it has changed tense.
It was so cool because by the end of the year, as I was asking my ones to summarize stories for me, they had started throwing qui and quae around because they heard them all the time and it was in their texts which they were reading out loud.
Long story short, we worry so much - I worry - that if I start using overly complex things (participles, varying tenses, weird clauses) they will stop understanding. But I keep finding, again and again, that if I speak slowly and clearly, check in with them, and tell them the things they need to know, not only do they not care if I'm using complicated grammar; they actually don't even notice unless I call their attention to it.
I've been thinking about this a lot, so do give me your input: what would happen if we just treated grammar like vocabulary, period? My kids didn't get demonstratives very well last year when we treated it as grammar. This year, when I did it as vocabulary and just told them the accusatives were sometimes weird, they didn't have much of a problem with it at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment