"You really expect me to read all that Latin!" - Strategies for Reading Latin Texts
by Caroline Kelly, Covenant Day School, NC

Kelly discusses issues that students encounter when faced with a long Latin passage. She offers educators insights on “prior knowledge” that students may or may not bring to the reading of a Latin passage. To demonstrate to educators what students face when reading long passages of Latin, Kelly provides a poem in Russian and encourages educators to use textual cues to decipher as much as they can about the text without actually translating it. This “pre-reading” demonstrates that with the prior knowledge educators have of languages they can get the gist of the text. Kelly provides three (3) example exercises that can be used in the classroom with Ecce Romani and other Latin texts.

Click on one of the links below:

• Introduction
• “You really expect me to read that!”
• The Concept of Prior Knowledge
• Identification of Prior Knowledge Essential for Success in Specific Reading Passages
• Possible Areas for Fruitful Pre-reading Exercises
• Example Exercise 1: What's going on?
• Example Exercise 2: UBI SUNT VERBA?
• Example Exercise 2: Derivatives