Projects

Greek Workbook: Gospel Of St John

Description

Round 3 Teaching Development Grant

The partners involved in developing the John Workbook project all teach New Testament Greek (and some, Classical Greek) to beginners at University level.

Although there is a plethora of grammar books to help students learn Greek from scratch, there is a gap in the existing materials aimed at helping people to go on after this to read the New Testament independently. Some materials do not offer enough detail to a beginner (e.g. Cleon L. Rogers Jr & Cleon L. Rogers III, The New Linguistic and Exegetical Key to the Greek New Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), or Max Zerwick and Mary Grosvenor, A Grammatical Analysis of the Greek New Testament (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1988)), others assume too much knowledge, (e.g. C.K. Barrett's commentary on John's gospel).

The project partners therefore decided to develop some material specifically aimed at those who have been through a basic Greek grammar course (such as Wenham, MacNair, Bruce, etc) and who are now ready to read the New Testament for themselves, perhaps without further immediate access to Greek teaching support. We tried to keep in mind, for example, the minister who wants to read the New Testament in Greek but has no other source of help than a basic grammar book and our materials.

What kind of solution?

The project partners decided that our guiding principle should be to produce "stuff which helps students to know Greek better" - in other words we should produce a pragmatic and practical aid to comprehension, which we decided to do by writing a grammatical commentary on selected chapters (4,5,9,10,13,14,18-21) from John's Gospel - a John Workbook. We chose John's gospel because this text is generally agreed to be relatively easy for beginners, and indeed is often chosen as a first year Greek text. We felt it important to bear in mind how much help is still needed by those who may have had only a year at most of formal tuition, and therefore decided to concentrate on three main areas:

* Morphology: explaining unusual forms and reminding the reader of basic principles

* Basic syntax: paying attention especially to verb tenses and moods, reminding the reader of the meaning of the aorist or perfect tense, for example

* Basic linguistic issues, for example pointing out "unusual" word order, helping the reader to recognise special emphases, and so on.

Our aim was that our material should help students to know Greek better: we consider that the only way to achieve this is by extensive reading, and so our materials should make reading Greek more rewarding to encourage the student to read as much as possible. Our material should also prepare students for using more advanced books and commentaries by for example introducing them to more complex grammatical terms (such as indeclinable, cognate, gnomic).

Our approach to developing the John Workbook

The partners felt that those who have been teaching Greek for many years are not always in the best position to understand the kind of help that beginners need. We consequently decided that the involvement of our end users would be key to developing material that would be at the kind of level wanted and that therefore would actually be used. We decided that we would draft some initial material (based on John chapters 4,5,8,9,20 and 21) in a variety of styles to act as a baseline, and that we would then field-test this material in three institutions: the University of Cambridge Divinity Faculty, London Bible College (now the London School of Theology), and Spurgeon's College. To help with this process we used a significant part of the LTSN funding to employ a professional market researcher, Louise Brown, who recommended that we use focus groups of students to give us feedback on our material - a qualitative research approach. Our timetable was as follows:

* Spring and summer terms 2003: field-testing initial material

* Summer and autumn 2003: revision of material following feedback

* Academic year 2003-4: further field-testing

* Summer 2004: final revisions

* Autumn 2004: publication

The qualitative research
Objectives

Louise Brown was asked to ascertain the following:

* Does the material cover the right information - for example, are the comments on more challenging issues or on issues students would have understood without extra help?

* Does the material cover the right quantity of information?

* Which are the most helpful elements?

* Where do students suggest amendments and improvements?

* How useful are the materials across the spectrum of student ability?

The materials 
The format of the materials is a grammatical commentary, quite discursive in style as we imagined people might use the notes alone. There are also questions (with answers) every half dozen or so verses, in order to stimulate active learning, and as stepping-stones to exegesis. Style conventions were agreed between the partners (sequence of information for verbs and nouns for example), and reference was made to introductory grammars but to no other work, since we considered the notes should be usable alone.

The focus groups 
These took place in June 2003 at Cambridge and at London Bible College, comprising two groups of volunteer students at each institution: the meetings were moderated by Louise Brown and with no Greek teachers present! Samples of the three different types of material used at Cambridge, LBC and Spurgeon's were available to both groups for comparison, so that students could look at material unfamiliar to them. Each meeting lasted for about an hour and a half, began by looking at the material familiar to the students, then moved on to compare "their" notes with material used at the other two institutions.

Key issues 
Following the focus groups, we were able to identify five key issues to consider when revising our initial drafts:

1. What students appreciated
   The notes were considered to be pitched at the right level and it was easy for students to find their way around. The explanations of linguistic terms were helpful. The notes helped to consolidate students' learning from their introductory textbooks, and also helped them with other New Testament courses, by enabling them to understand commentators and writers.
2. Difficulties students experienced
   Students felt hindered by their lack of English grammar knowledge (in fact, students whose second language was English were often better equipped on this score). Some felt that the notes were too advanced in some instances and that they wanted simpler materials. All commented that clear signposting around the material was important.
3. Differences between Cambridge and LBC students
   The two objectives for the John Workbook that were presented to the students were: (1) Getting to know Greek better; (2) Engaging with John's Gospel in Greek

Cambridge students identified primarily with the first objective, LBC students with the second.

For Cambridge students, their primary motivation in studying Greek was to pass the examination at the end of the year; for LBC students, their primary motivation was to read and understand the New Testament - although both groups said that the other motivation was also important to them.

How the notes were used
We found that the notes were used by students in a variety of ways: to answer questions set by their teacher, to translate, as a check after answering questions, and for revision. Teachers also used the notes differently: at LBC students were asked to prepare text, and answers to the notes' questions, before class, whereas at Cambridge the notes were used when working through the text in class.

Presentation
Presentation was extremely important to students - engaging presentation aids learning! Materials demanding interactivity were also considered important. Signposts and navigation aids that were as clear as possible were needed so that students know how to use the material. Students suggested for example that we consider separating (for example by layout or font change) the different aspects of the grammatical comment- basic grammar and parsing, advanced grammar, linguistics, and theology. We also found that we needed to work on the clarity and simplicity of the language of the notes - some students found some of the language too dense or archaic. There were mixed views on referring to other secondary literature within the Workbook - some felt this was helpful in order to reinforce learning, others felt that everything necessary should be in the workbook.

Responding to the feedback
Following the focus group sessions, we returned to our initial drafts and re-worked them in a consistent style, standardising our level of comment. Project partners used the feedback to add further chapters to the Workbook (13-14, 18-19). We also developed a Johannine lexicon in response to the desire for the Workbook to be usable on its own, using Accordance to set it up, and checking it against standard lexica, especially BDAG, for Johannine usage. LTSN funding enabled us to employ a former LST student to do the legwork on this part of the project. We added a grammatical glossary to address the varying levels of knowledge of grammatical terms across our student sample.

We then put the material out again to a sample of students, this time with a questionnaire, and the questionnaire findings confirmed that the level, quantity and quality of the Workbook notes were now about right. There was also much more positive comment on the presentation of the material.

Publication and ongoing development
With ten chapters (just under half of John) now covered by the Workbook, the project partners have decided that they would like to aim to complete the commentary so that the whole of John is included.

Start date

Amount