Who? Latin teachers of all kinds & all methodologies. Maybe you?
What? An archive of free, comprehensible stories for Latin teachers & students of all levels but especially I & II with each story tagged for easy searching.
- free means free use for education (not publication). That also means it can't be a simplified version of a CLC story etc. You can target certain textbooks' vocabulary & sequence, but you have to make up your own plots.
- comprehensible means vocabulary sheltered to high frequency forms which are more likely to be known by more students from many textbooks, and it can mean including pictures or other aids to comprehension.
- especially I & II because there are lots and lots of texts available for Latin learners, but they tend to be very specific to the textbook series in question, and most of them have large amounts of vocabulary that needs to be glossed.
- tagged by grammatical structures encountered, target phrases & verbs, genre (myth, history, culture, just for fun, etc.), and National Latin Exam level of grammar.
Why stories? Check out LIMEN for information on why and how language learners need input (i.e. in this case, written stories in the target language) in general. Specifically, these stories serve two purposes: to provide teachers with materials to build from for their classes, particularly if they're working with TPRS and need story scripts; and to provide novice and intermediate level students with materials for extensive reading.
Why sharing? Writing a sufficient number of original Latin stories with sheltered vocab and targeted grammar is a tremendous amount of work for any given teacher. That said, many of us are doing it to some degree or another. To keep those stories to ourselves is a waste of our own effort. Let's make life easier for ourselves and our students by sharing our work.
Why are you doing it for free? Without the free advice, support, and materials on the internet, I would never have learned about CI and TPRS and I would likely quit teaching Latin. I want to give back.
Why should *I* do it for free? Because you're doing it anyway on our own. Because there's little or no money in Latin publishing anyway. Because publishing takes time and we need resources sooner than later.
How? Glad you asked!
- Click here to submit a story directly through a Google form!
- Email me at arnold.elliej@gmail.com
- Tweet or message me @magistrissima
If you have a bunch of stories and can maintain the formatting & tagging standards, become a blog author with me and put your stories in directly!
It's a reference to One Thousand and One Nights, of course, but milleetunanoctes is awful, so here we are. MInoctes would have worked too I suppose. Oh well.
Can you add a tag for <parameter>?
Depends. Individual vocab words and grammar features is too time consuming & takes up too much space. Otherwise, probably.
Why NLE level?
I'm using the NLE levels because they are easily accessible and understandable for us teachers, aligned with most textbook sequences as far as I know, and because "Latin I" and "Latin III" mean totally different things to different teachers depending on their districts' standards and all kinds of things.
How are these stories truly CI if you're suggesting we pay attention to the NLE level of the grammar?
They're not. A chunk of text is no more comprehensible than a pile of sticks (arguably, less) without the teacher as the medium. True CI is going to involve pictures and gestures and carefully limiting the vocabulary to mostly words any given class has already encountered and become comfortable with. These are raw materials for you and me to mold into something comprehensible for OUR students. The level thing is just to help teachers sort through these.
Some other questions you may have
Why mille noctes?It's a reference to One Thousand and One Nights, of course, but milleetunanoctes is awful, so here we are. MInoctes would have worked too I suppose. Oh well.
Can you add a tag for <parameter>?
Depends. Individual vocab words and grammar features is too time consuming & takes up too much space. Otherwise, probably.
Why NLE level?
I'm using the NLE levels because they are easily accessible and understandable for us teachers, aligned with most textbook sequences as far as I know, and because "Latin I" and "Latin III" mean totally different things to different teachers depending on their districts' standards and all kinds of things.
How are these stories truly CI if you're suggesting we pay attention to the NLE level of the grammar?
They're not. A chunk of text is no more comprehensible than a pile of sticks (arguably, less) without the teacher as the medium. True CI is going to involve pictures and gestures and carefully limiting the vocabulary to mostly words any given class has already encountered and become comfortable with. These are raw materials for you and me to mold into something comprehensible for OUR students. The level thing is just to help teachers sort through these.
