• Empathy trumps experience.

• Learning centered, rather than teacher or learner centered.

• Lead with a Communication-Focus.

• Have fun.

My teaching experiences have led me to a conclusion that I sum up with this maxim: empathy trumps expertise. When I first walked into the classroom, I discovered that what I needed more than expertise was a better pedagogy. The students we have at our Lutheran ministerial school in Malawi are mature and motivated but many have only experienced rote learning. I quickly found that I needed an approach that would engage them in critical thinking. In my Biblical Greek class, things were going particularly poorly. It was not for lack of expertise, a syllabus, or good materials. I needed a different way of teaching Greek. Empathy for my students led me on a path to delightful discoveries of a better pedagogical approach for teaching Koine Greek.

My first discovery about pedagogy was not in the field of language, it was a teaching approach called Dialogue Education (Vella, 2002). Fundamental to the approach is designing small group discussions to lead students to grapple with the lesson content. As the students carried on their dialogues I saw their ability to discuss and think through issues blossom. Learning became the focus, rather than either the teacher or the student.

This dialogic pedagogy served in the classes I led on literary interpretation (hermeneutics), literature overview (isagogics), and teaching methods (pedagogy). Perhaps it was that very success that made me even more dissatisfied with the teacher and content centered way I was teaching Greek. Byram and García draw a direct line from “the humanistic approaches in the United States which advocate the role of human relationships in the teaching and learning process versus the previous all-important and impersonal teacher-centred approaches” (2009, p. 492) and the development of current practices in language teaching. Whatever the case, I knew what I was doing was not working. Only one or two out of twenty students in the class were keeping up while the rest were lost. I set out on a quest for a better way and found it in the current principles and practices of second language acquisition.

Most current Ancient Greek instruction consists of labeling and explaining language structures and setting practice or memorization assignments, in other words, the Grammar Translation method. Current research-based methods of teaching living languages are based on the axiom that language is acquired through communication. A Communicative Approach seeks to move beyond linguistic competence, knowledge about a language, to communicative competence, ability to understand and use a language (Larsen-Freeman & Anderson, 2011). I felt I found what I was looking for in the Communicative Approach and set my mind to using it in my teaching.

It might well be questioned whether communicative competence is necessary in the case of Greek. Are we wasting time when our final aim is reading Greek? I think that question should be reframed. Can the majority of learners learn to read with comprehension without learning Greek communicatively? My answer is, no. As with our mother tongue, we first learn to communicate and then learn to read.

I believe a degree of communicative competence is a prerequisite to gaining the ability to read with comprehension. One proof of this is what happens in the act of reading. As we read, we predict what will come next (Smith, 1975). In my opinion, normal learners do not develop this predictive ability in a language without encountering a language in a communicative way. However, when learners have had a communicative encounter with a verb such as ἐπορεύθη [he traveled], they will read it expecting to hear εἰς / πρός τινα [to somewhere].

Admittedly, it is more difficult to employ a Communicative Approach when teaching a language that is dead and unspoken. So we make it alive again. We listen, speak, read and write in Koine Greek. One method we use is called Total Physical Response (Asher, 2003). I give commands and my students stand, sit, write their names on the board, and much more. Another method is Teaching Proficiency through Storytelling and Reading (Ray, 2015). I tell a story line by line. The students answer simple comprehension questions: Who went to town? When did they go? Why did they go? Once we have engaged with the lesson content in communicative ways, I feel free to employ more deductive methods such as, explicit grammar instruction, vocabulary cards, and translation exercises.

I ensure that any initial exposure to a language feature is communicative and have seen positive results. As students hear and compose stories in Greek, they learn to highlight the main point and put other information in the background. An awareness develops that spills over in the task of reading, leading them to recognized departures from the default, or markedness (Runge, 2010). Likewise, hearing and speaking the sounds of Greek gives a learner an intuitive grasp of morphology. For example, students often add a regular ending on an irregular verb. I applaud. They are showing that the regular forms are truly internalized.

A great deal of clapping and laughing goes on in my classroom. The Communicative Approach creates an atmosphere in which students are confident and have fun. A person could ask whether all that fun will translate into the ultimate goal of being able to read the New Testament with comprehension. My students do not fully reach that goal during their three years with me, as is generally true of any formal program of Greek instruction. However, I am confident that my students have the foundation, interest, and ability to keep on learning Greek as autodidacts and gain whatever is lacking in their understanding.

A frequent question I get from traditional Greek teachers is whether my students will be able to do exegesis. It depends on what we mean by exegesis. On the one hand, if doing exegesis means arguing for a certain interpretation in esoteric grammatical terms, they will struggle. In my teaching, being able to talk about the language is a secondary goal to understanding the language. So my students will know what ποτήριον ὕδατος [cup of water] means and that it is a construction with the Genitive case, but they have not learned a label such as Genitive of Contents. On the other hand, if doing exegesis means drawing understanding from the original, then certainly my students can do exegesis. They can see the nuances of the Greek text versus a translation, will recognize the significance of verbal aspect, and will be able to distinguish the main point of a passage from background information.

It has been a joy to watch my students develop. They are engaged and enthusiastic about learning to understand the New Testament in its original language. Whatever hand I had in this encouraging outcome was the fruit of the most important expertise in teaching, empathy. I empathized with my struggling Greek learners and fell upon a better pedagogy. The search for a better way to teach Greek is settled for me now. Improving on my implementation of it will keep me happy and busy for as many years as God gives.

Paul D. Nitz, BA, M.Div., ORDM

April 2019

References

Asher, J. (2003). Learning another language through actions (6. ed., 2. print). Los Gatos, Calif: Sky Oaks Productions.

Byram, M., & García, M. del C. M. (2009). Communicative language teaching. In K. Knapp, B. Seidlhofer, & H. Widdowson (Eds.), Handbook of Foreign Language Communication and Learning (pp. 491–516). De Gruyter, Inc. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/michstate-ebooks/detail.action?docID=476029

Larsen-Freeman, D., & Anderson, M. (2011). Techniques & principles in language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ray, B. (2015). Fluency through TPR Storytelling (7. edition). Berkeley, Cal: Command Performance Language Institute.

Runge, S. E. (2010). Discourse grammar of the Greek New Testament: A practical introduction for teaching and exegesis. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.

Smith, F. (1975). The role of prediction in reading. Elementary English, 52(3), 305–311.

Vella, J. K. (2002). Learning to listen, learning to teach: the power of dialogue in educating adults (Rev. ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.