Projects

Empowering the Curriculum - Communicative Competence and the Role of Grammar

Description

Round 6 Teaching Development Grant

Communicative competence comprises five main areas of knowledge: discourse competence (how are sentences or paragraphs connected to each other), linguistic competence (sentence-level morphology and syntax), strategic competence (how to solve problems when communication breaks down) and sociocultural as well as rhetorical competence (how various decisions about how to express an idea make a difference in how one's intended meaning is received).

Especially in the case of languages dubbed 'dead' such as Ancient Greek and Latin language teaching has traditionally often focussed exclusively on linguistic competence. My project 'Empowering the Curriculum: Communicative Competence and the Role of Grammar' seeks to address this imbalance by examining the material and methods used in all levels of Latin language teaching at King's College, London in order to develop a Latin curriculum in which the courses are interconnected, building up on and supplementing each other, thereby addressing all five fields of communicative competency to the same degree. I am thinking about designing a curriculum for beginners' Latin courses in which the successive courses actually link up and build directly upon each other (i.e. returning to a certain topic in year II and thereby revisiting and simultaneously extending the students' knowledge). My experience has taught me that because of high staff turnover, teaching staffs' preferences or dislikes for certain texts or topics and the (relative) non prescriptiveness of language modules students often arrive in advanced language courses such as Latin III or IV with very varied expertise. By linking up the different modules as part of a curriculum we will be creating the possibility to revisit material on a higher level. This provides students with the opportunity to reflect on their own progress, whilst simultaneously demonstrating that they have progressed. This issue is especially important for retention as many students waver because they feel they are not getting anywhere, building in re-visits of material addresses this issue effectively... Thus I plan selecting a piece of text for this in the early stages and develop a translation/critique/commentary on it as the degree programme progresses, using it as the basis for a reflective log. This will enable the students to develop a higher perspective on their language learning experience.

As in times of staff shortage and scarce resources many departments face the challenge of how to streamline and update their language acquisition courses, so it will prove helpful to design and trial a model curriculum. The most useful and transferable element in this will be the exercises/texts that will be set at different levels to show and assess the progression in the five communicative competences outlined above. These could even be integrated into other courses that do not inter-relate in the way that ours will (i.e. at any institution) to enable the assessment of the acquisition of so-called 'soft skills'.

In the long-term the possibility exists that such a course (and its activities as identified in the comment above) may serve as a 'benchmark' with regards to standards of attainment in relation to university language learning from beginners level and PGCEs in Classics.

Course outline, teaching resources and course material will be made available on the Subject Centre website together with a briefing paper, and papers will be given at relevant conferences.

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