Teaching Latin in Latin

In the Renaissance, Latin was usually taught through the medium of Latin. Various textbooks were published, giving teachers examples of the types of dialogues they could use to examine in grammar, from the very first stages.

Vocabulary was built by showing objects, by acting out, or by displaying pictures.

This method of teaching died out when Latin stopped being used as a spoken language of the educated, around the mid 1700's. The main reason this happened, was the rise of the Nation State, and the resulting focus on patriotism, and the national languages.

By the mid 1800's, Latin was almost universally taught as a translation course, or as a philological course, and not as a language course per se.

However, as Comenius noted in the mid 1700's, no matter the goal - for example, when teaching Biblical Hebrew, where no communicative facility is required, the most expeditious method of gaining knowledge, is still through listening, and reading, with listening coming first - the point is where do you stop developing your skill - if you are just learning the language to read in it, your skill level in speaking need not develop.

In Comenius' day, skill at speaking the vernacular, and Latin, were both desirable.

In the late 1900's various teachers tried to resurrect the previous method  - Adler, in 1856, wrote a huge textbook based around spoken Latin. Others composed similar courses. 

However, the lack of teachers who could speak the language, or teach it in the language itself, meant these efforts were largely ignored. Scientific knowledge about how languages are learned progressed. Latin remained a philological subject. The hours available for teaching it were much reduced,and the expectations that students would actually be able to read fluently, vanished. A generation of teachers arose who had limited language skills in the language they were teaching - versed in grammar, they were more akin to linguistics students, who analyse a language, than their colleagues in the French and Spanish departments.

There is a growing number of teachers who want to teach Latin in Latin, who acknowledge that this makes their classes more attractive to their students, that enrollments are higher, when the classes are more enjoyable, and are not just about grammar, and translation.

As an experiment, a model language class was developed, and the lessons posted on YouTube, using Adler's Latin Ollendorff text as the fundamental text, with the grammatical exegesis in Latin drawn from a selection of renaissance textbooks. 

This course - which will consist of several hundred short lessons, makes extensive use of gesture, physical objects, and slide shows with voice over for objects that cannot be easily obtained. Latin is taught through dialogue. Grammatical concepts are introduced incrementally, and slowly the student builds up the ability to discuss Latin grammar in Latin, while gradually expanding their ability to talk about a wider range of subjects.