Rethinking 'Unseen' Translation: a pilot scheme for developing students' reading skills in Greek and Latin

Description

Round 2 Teaching Development Grant

Proposal

The project proposed to investigate current theory and practice using 'unseen' translation as a method of teaching Greek and Latin to university students. Our objective was to determine whether this 'old school' method of language education retained its efficicacy amid newer generations of classics students, many of whom begin at least Greek, if not also Latin, ab initio at university, and if not, how it might be adapted to better suit the changed and changing needs of these students. To this end, we compiled questionnaires, conducted interviews and held seminars with the aim of creating and testing teaching materials demonstrating a variety of styles of presenting 'unseen' passages to students (what we call 'templates') in order to improve their learning experience, both in relation to language attainment and to the wider appreciation of their classical studies. The results of these trials, we hoped, would help make explicit what is still valuable about the use of 'unseens' as well as providing guidelines as to how they might be made more relevant to the classical discipline today, and, more practically, as to what kind of support materials to design to further this aim.

Results of investigation

There were several stages of the project influencing the development of our project:

* From our questionnaire feedback on current teaching practice, we gained insight into how 'unseens' are used and in what ways they are felt to be useful as a medium for language teaching, but it was also clear that there was both a need and a desire to re-evaluate the ways in which 'unseens' are taught, particularly as reading continuous texts may be felt by some to be a far more constructive method of language teaching in this generation, even if 'unseen' translation remains useful for the purpose of assessment.

* From our interviews, we determined that perhaps the most important function of the 'unseen' today is the access it offers students to the wider classical world beyond their set texts, as well as the opportunity to revisit authors they may not be currently reading, that is to expand their knowledge of the classical world and its languages, as well as to keep familiar what they have already experienced - in both cases the thematic and the linguistic are united.

* From trials of our templates, we found that students and teachers by and large felt that supplementary material (introduction to the author and work, vocabulary, leading questions about syntax and interpretation) and linking passages based on thematic coherence brought more to the students' learning experience and encouraged teachers to be more reflective about their own practice and aims.

Our one difficulty arose from insufficient time to circulate  (and re-circulate revised) templates even more widely than we did. Despite this constraint, we have identified a widespread demand for new anthologies of passages that reflect a more integrated approach to translation akin to what we have been developing in this project. A database gathering passages that were cross-referenced by theme and grammatical constructions is a desideratum that would enable teachers to create language classes better designed to show students the value and depth to be had from engaging with texts in the original. We hope that our report will inspire more efforts in this area.

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