Horizontal Declensions

Recently, a fellow Latin teacher, having read about horizontal conjugations here on my blog, asked me what I thought about horizontal declensions. FYI - Latin is an inflected language, so much like German and Russian, we have to deal with case endings on nouns which communicate the function of the word in the sentence. Hence, inflected languages can be tricky for learners since when they encounter a word, two things are going on in their minds: they must interpret the meaning and then its grammatical function. Therefore, Latin grammar encompasses both verb conjugations and noun/adjective declensions.

As i began to think about the question of doing a horizontal declension, I know that for many Latin teachers, here are the bigger questions: how can we Latin teachers teach declension endings in a non-grammar-translation way? Is there a CI/ADI way in which we can get students to acquire declension endings according to a traditional textbook timeline (such as "by week 3 of Latin 1, students will have acquired the nominative singular and accusative singular cases for the first three declensions")?

Let me first say this: there is absolutely NO fast track to getting all students to acquire declension endings or any grammatical construction by a certain deadline. We must remember the following:

1. Language acquisition is not linear in nature.
2. Language acquisition does not follow a prescribed timeline, nor does everyone acquire language at the same rate.
3. Language acquisition follows a prescribed order of what is acquired. One cannot alter that order, BUT we should not think that we should be teaching language in that order until students master it. This assumes that language acquisition is linear and that all students will be on the same timeline of acquisition.
4. Language acquisition is subconscious and implicit, hence NO DEGREE OF EXPLICIT instruction can alter that (this includes memorizing grammar charts).

So I began to look online for anything on horizontal declensions - I did not find anything. I even asked Eric Richards (a CI/ADI German teacher who deals with an inflected language) what he thought of the idea and if he did anything like this. My big concern was that teachers were wanting to take sentences like "the king sees the queen" and want to change the perspective so that the king and queen switch places ("the queen sees the king"). To me, that is a lot of Latin grammar for novice level students to wield at the same time (especially after 3 weeks of Latin 1!) - this may be better suited for upper level students. 

However, as I continued to think this through, I realized that a horizontal declension can have its place though if it is focused. Maybe just change one noun grammatically in a passage so that it is much tighter in focus (but not right away though in the opening weeks of Latin 1)? 

Observations

1. Doing a horizontal declension should be used as a supplement for a continuation of exposing students to case endings in a communicative context.
2. Were my students able to complete this correctly? The answer is yes. Do they truly understand case endings and understand the nominative and accusative cases now? Probably not. But after months of doing pop-up grammar about "the letter m ending indicating direct object," this at least gave students a chance to interact with declension endings in a communicative context and to reinforce the idea.
3. I just tried this out in my Latin 1 classes, and this is the last week of the semester before the final exam. In the future, I would like to see how this goes maybe after the first two months and after much exposure to Latin sentence patterns and pop-up grammar explanations about the accusative case.
4. If you notice in the explanation, I did not refer to the case names but rather to the grammatical functions. This is not to say that I do not think that the case names are important, but I am finding that students do not know grammar terms to begin with.
5. Now that I have introduced the idea of horizontal declension, I can see now doing this as a bellringer.

So I will continue to play around with this idea and to try it out - this is definitely still a work in progress. I am curious what you think of it. If there is information about out there about doing horizontal declensions, I would love to hear about it.