I see this all the time when teaching the accusative case to a beginner level class of mixed ability.Ī lot of textbooks, when introducing the accusative, just keep on piling on sentence after sentence in the format of Subject-Object-Verb (SOV):Īs teachers we try to verbally explain that the ending of “puella” changed here, and this is the accusative case and you should pay atttention to it. The error comes in believing that if a student successfully translates a sentence which happens to contain the target grammar feature, they necessarily understood the target grammar feature. There is sound wisdom in advice as basic as “give them just enough challenge” – that it is what we aim to do in teaching every subject, not just languages. help) until they can do it with the scaffold, then gradually take the scaffold away.” And “if a challenge is too great, give them scaffolding (i.e.
This is extremely similar to Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development which can be summarised as “for optimal learning, give a student enough challenge but not too much”.
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Put simply, a learner should be introduced to the each feature of the language incrementally, by receiving input that contains their previous level of competence plus the next feature (i + 1). I’ve been on Latin reddit discussions for years and one single educational theory comes up again and again as if it were the only way to learn a language: Krashen and his comprehensible input hypothesis.