Innovative Classicist "Raises the Dead" By Employing Spoken Latin In Class

Editor's note: On 13 December 2002, Jeanne Neumann spoke for an hour about Latin on WFAE's "Charlotte Talks" radio show. You can listen to the interview here.

Jeanne Neumann, an associate professor of classics at Davidson, eventually just got tired of looking at the top of students' heads in her Latin class.

She, and generations of students before her, learned Latin with their heads in a book, decoding the sentences in formulaic fashion by searching for the verb, a nominative and an accusative. "It's certainly more a dead language than alive when you do it that way," she conceded. "It's sort of like a parlor game, just a bunch of symbols on a page that you memorize rather than a viable means of communication."

Neumann figured there had to be a better way, and thus launched a seven-year pedagogical Odyssey toward leadership in Latinitas viva, a movement that immerses students in Latin.

Her great journey began with a small step. In an effort to at least make eye contact in class, Neumann began projecting passages from the textbook onto a screen via transparencies. That way she could see faces and make sure that all students knew what passages she was referencing.

She's come so far since then that those early years of the mid-1990s seem like the Dark Ages. Her current classroom features oral interchange in Latin with students about everything from the weather to family pets to Ovid's poetry. The textbook for her introductory Latin class doesn't include a single word of English, and students do homework on Web pages that link vocabulary to on-line Latin dictionaries, and art references to images of those paintings.

"What they're going to do most throughout their lives is to read Latin," she said. "But you'll learn to read a lot better if you employ as many senses as possible in learning it."

Neumann walks into the classroom and immediately starts talking in Latin. She may relate a silly story about her two sons, her "gladiators," or she may instruct students to open a window. She repeats words and phrases deliberately and slowly, emphasizes her points with gestures and facial expression, and translates a word or two into English when all else fails. She uses simple narratives. Through repetition and variation she says the same thing in different ways, all the while introducing small changes. She asks questions which call on students to reply orally by rearranging sentence structure.

"It gets into their heads more than if I just write down sentences on the board for them to copy and memorize," she said. "It gives them a more real sense of the language."

Classical Latin was the common language throughout the Roman Republic, which at its height stretched from modern-day England to Iran. Its usage peaked in the second century, then fell with the empire. As the Romans moved out, local languages developed and replaced Latin. By the eighth century, no one spoke it as a native tongue. However, it remained the lingua franca of science, and was a requirement for scholars for centuries. Its status declined rapidly in the twentieth century as a growing number of colleges dropped Latin as a requirement. Another heavy blow was struck when the Catholic Church at the Second Vatican Council in 1962-65 decided to allow the vernacular in place of Latin in celebrating Mass.

Still, the rise and spread of Latin has had a profound influence on the world that is still felt in the many Latin words in all romance languages, and particularly in the terminology of medicine, law, and religion.

Neumann took her first Latin course as a junior English major at Union College in the mid-1970s. She taught Latin, English, and ancient history at a private high school for three years, then earned a master's degree in Latin and Greek at Indiana University in 1981. For the next six years she taught in the classics department at another private high school. In 1987 she enrolled at Harvard, where she earned a Ph.D. in classical philology in 1994. Davidson hired her into its faculty that same year.

Neumann said, "I was taught Latin non-conversationally because the main reason you learned it was to read ancient authors, and they’re all dead! You can't talk to them, or anyone else, so what's the point in learning to speak or understand spoken Latin?" But Neumann and a few other Latin scholars saw the success of immersion methods of teaching "live" modern languages, and recognized their application to learning Latin.

"So what if a student can't use Latin to place an order at McDonalds?" she said. "My personal experience has demonstrated that Latintas viva is a great way to gain a better understanding of those dead authors, and of the Latin phrases and references that show up all around us every day."

She began tinkering with spoken Latin on her own in the mid-1990s "because it made sense." She was then attracted to The University of Kentucky, where the fervent oral Latin proponent Professor Terence Tunberg had initiated in 1997 an annual summer conventiculum. His ten-day, all-Latin seminar was designed to train teachers and graduate students in speaking Latin. Tunberg developed a canon of texts suitable for imitation and study, common sense guidelines for pronunciation, and means to augment ancient Latin vocabulary to accommodate modern concepts.

Neumann attended three consecutive conventicula from 1998-2000, and wrote an article about the 1998 edition in the journal, The Classical Outlook. She observed, "The advantages of Latinitas viva are many and significant. Speaking Latin in class not only will… enable students to learn Latin faster and more thoroughly, and to become much better readers. It greatly facilitates the acquisition of vocabulary, syntax, and a feel for the language."

She concedes that the new approach wasn't easy—even for someone like herself who was a fluent Latin reader. "In some ways it was like learning the language all over again," she said. "I found I had been pronouncing it wrong in my head all those years. It was like when you've been reading the 'Peanuts' comic strip your whole life, and then see a TV version. Charlie Brown doesn't sound at all like you expect!"

But she found the payoff personally rewarding. "When you start making an effort in your speech to understand the way a language works, you come to know it in more active way. I'm a much better reader now than I was when I got my Ph.D. because I understand written Latin in a deeper way." Neumann began incorporating oral Latin into her classes at Davidson in 1998, and wrote another article for The Classical Outlook to explain how other Latin teachers could begin incorporating oral techniques into their instruction. She also conducted a workshop for high school teachers here that year.

She now uses spoken Latin in all her courses. It's most useful in beginning courses, where it generates an enthusiasm for the enterprise and familiarizes students with vocabulary and sentence structure. In upper level courses she asks students to paraphrase a reading in their own words, or to explain a poem in their own words.

She admits that not all students are thrilled at the approach. Students who have studied Latin in high school and first encounter oral Latin in upper-level classes sometimes rail against it. She said, "One student said my teaching was too much about what it all meant, and she just liked figuring out the puzzle. I thought that was pretty amusing!"

She continued, "It's all still a work in progress. But I've gotten it to a point now that my beginning students ask, 'How can you learn Latin if you don't speak it?'"

In addition to their classroom time with Neumann, students in introductory classes also have two drill sessions per week with a student apprentice teacher. Those sessions don't use dialogue, however, because no students are fluent enough to conduct it. Instead, the instructor puts students through standard drills where they answer in spoken voice. Neumann's students do their homework at a computer, because she has found the technology extremely valuable "as a way to get in their face more." She said, "It gives them easy links to cultural and historical information that's interesting, but that they wouldn't explore on their own."

For example, an assignment about Roman satire directed students toward an article in the journal The Onion which illustrated the same type of literary approach. "I want to show them how the discipline they're studying relates to culture in a broader sense," she said.

Neumann contends it's appropriate to use modern Web technology to teach the ancient language because Latin is a web maker in itself. Latin-derived words and Latin references riddle almost all contemporary fields of study. She takes calls regularly from professors in other departments seeking an explanation for a Latin reference they've discovered. "The coolest thing about Latin is how much I've learned about so many other things by studying it," she said.

Convinced that she's found a better way to teach, Neumann contends that the future of Latinitas viva is bright. She and a former student conducted an oral Latin workshop at a meeting of the American Classical League, expecting a dozen or so participants. They were overwhelmed when more than 100 people attended.

Other initiatives include the organization Septrentrionale Americanum Latinitatis Vivae Institutum (SALVI), which was established in 1996 to preserve and revive Latin by promoting the spoken approach to instruction in academia. The National Standards for Classical Language Learning now has an oral proficiency requirement. In addition to its summer conventiculum, The University of Kentucky now offers a two-year master's degree in Oral Latin. A Pennsylvania classicist has written an oral Latin instructional textbook. Tunberg edits a "neo-Latin" on-line journal, Retiarius, and afficianados can tune into world news in Latin streamed over the Internet by a Finnish radio station.

The oral Latin movement is particularly strong among European scholars. Her Italian friend Luigi Miraglia, acknowledged as the most fluent Latin speaker in today's world, has even established a villa where scholars of all disciplines come to discuss matters in Latin.

For Neumann, though oral Latin is just part of the big picture, a means rather than an end. "It's a tool for teaching, but I don't want to devote my life to it," she said.

Her goal is finding better ways, whatever they be, to lead students to share her own fascination and appreciation for a particular means of human expression that so influenced the world that it endures after two millennia. There's that, and the fact that it's a way to see some student faces!

Davidson is a highly selective independent liberal arts college for 1,600 students. Since its establishment in 1837, the college has graduated 23 Rhodes Scholars and is consistently ranked in the top ten liberal arts colleges in the country by U.S. News and World Report magazine. Davidson is engaged in Let Learning Be Cherished, a $250 million campaign in support of student financial assistance, academic resources, and community life.