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:
- Language acquisition is not linear in nature.
- Language acquisition does not follow a prescribed timeline, nor does everyone acquire language at the same rate.
- 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.
- Language acquisition is subconscious and implicit, hence NO DEGREE OF EXPLICIT instruction can alter that (this includes memorizing grammar charts).
Observations
- Doing a horizontal declension should be used as a supplement for a continuation of exposing students to case endings in a communicative context.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Back when I learned about horizontal conjugation from Susie Gross, we would write a story on the board and then start to show students how we would tell it from a different perspective (Russian also has the declensions). I would cross out words and write the replacements on the side of the story, then ask for volunteers to read with the changes. After a couple kids had done that, I would challenge anyone to read if I were to erase the replacement words. That always got some volunteers. Students enjoyed the challenge levels, and the whole class got the input multiple times. Having the crossed-out words but not the changed ones let me feel secure that they would change the correct word endings. (Thanks for the reminder...I'm going to try to do this occasionally -- obviously only with verbs -- in Spanish. It's one more way to get students to re-read a story with a different focus, and it's a useful, quick way to get some grammar in...my old traditional heart will sing...)
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