The aim of this study is to assess the pedagogical soundness and validity of introducing an overarching gamified lesson structure to a Year 10 Latin class. Gamification can be defined simply as the process by which elements of game design (for example competition and point scoring) are incorporated into alternative contexts, including education (Yee, 2013, p. 335). This study will seek to measure the effect of a gamified course structure on two elements: students' ability to fulfil lesson objectives, and their general attitude and motivation towards formative work. Very recently, examples of gamified learning environments have arisen in the Latin classroom (Gloyn, 2015 and Pike, 2015). Although this is a small pool of samples, the contemporary nature of the publications shines a light on the possibility that gamification is an emergent pedagogical tool. This has provided the impetus for the following study of the effectiveness of an overarching gamified structure on Year 10 students' attainment and attitude towards the study of Latin. If successful, this topic has promising transfer potential, as it could be used as the basis for differentiation, a praise system, or even as a sister project, which provides a structure for tracking and rewarding formative work outside the classroom.

Latin teaching is stereotypically associated with rote-learning or as Mount (Amo, Amas, Amat … And All That, 2006, p. 13) summarises the experience: ‘learning dreary declensions and conjugations’. When I tell people that I am training to teach Latin, the most common response that I get in reply is something along the lines of ‘Oh, I did Latin in school…I wasn't very good at it… but I can still remember –bo, -bis, -bit…’ and they continue to conjugate in front of me. For many people their only memory of Latin is a joyless experience of grammar by rote, inspiring such rhymes as the one above. Although currently pedagogically unfashionable, there must be some value in rote-learning if people can still recite grammatical paradigms decades later. Inspired by this, I wanted to explore rote-learning in the modern classroom by utilising current research on methods of teaching Latin in the primary sector. Primary Latin teaching often includes sound and movement to engage learners, whilst retaining a heavy emphasis on grammar. I wanted to explore whether such techniques would work at secondary level.

Over the course of the year, it has become clear to me that when students are faced with the task of translating a passage into Latin, a significant amount freeze, panic occurs and they cannot make any sense of what they see in front of them. This is despite a lot of them having a secure grammatical knowledge of the language, which they can recognise perfectly well, when looking at sentences in isolation. This study will be looking at two particular students in a Year 10 class, both of whom score exceedingly low in assessed translations. My study will focus on why there is such a significant gap between their class attainment and their attainment in the translation aspect of assessments and whether this is an isolated phenomenon in their Latin class.

This article examines how a number of teachers of Classics at secondary school level say they deal with sensitive topics, such as violence, religious belief, death and sex and sexuality. In the secondary school original texts are read partly for improving the students' understanding of the language and partly for the study of other aspects of the ancient society, such as the subject matter and the process of a legal case, for example. Therefore, sensitive topics often arise incidentally during the reading of a text rather than because they are the particular feature of the reading. Should teachers brush past such an topic for fear of causing offence or getting into trouble with school authorities or parents, or should they use the topic to develop their students' understanding of the topic at hand – and if the latter, how far should they go?

Terence Tunberg is a professor of Latin Language and Literature at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. He is a world-renowned proponent of Latin speaking as a means of helping with language learning and, for more advanced students, as a way to consolidate knowledge of the language. He is the founder and convener of the Lexington Latin Conventiculum, a week-long total immersion seminar in active Latin that takes place each July. Mair Lloyd, a PhD student at the Open University, first met Prof Tunberg when she attended the 2014 Conventiculum and that experience became central to her PhD researching the communicative approach to Latin teaching through a sociocultural perspective on Latin learning. This interview was recorded shortly after she and Prof Tunberg took part in a panel on Living Latin at the Classical Association conference in Edinburgh, in April 2016. A link to recordings of the four panel papers can be found at the end of this article. The fourth recording shows Prof Tunberg demonstrating some of the techniques he uses in his teaching at the Conventiculum.

Book Seven of Herodotus’ Histories contains his account of the Persian expedition against Greece led by King Xerxes in 480 BCE. This campaign followed from the one undertaken ten years earlier on the orders of his father, King Darius. That Persian force had landed at Marathon and been defeated by the Athenians in a famous battle that has ever since been considered a victory of European freedom over Oriental despotism. Xerxes, determined to avenge his father's defeat, raised a force reported by Herodotus to be of as many as two and a half million fighting men, only to come up against the 300 Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae. This narrative of these and the subsequent battles of Salamis and Plataea has been well known from its Herodotean source ever since; and the muscle-bound and blood-drenched deeds of the 300 have recently been made famous again by the movie of that name. The more recent sequel to 300 begins with a less accurate account of the Battle of Marathon; and, where the first movie ended with Plataea under way, Rise of an Empire ends with victory at Salamis all but won. Courses in Western or World History are likely to come upon the Persian Wars, and the recent popular movies might serve as an accessible and engaging introduction to these historical events and developments. But Herodotus’ account of how Xerxes came to his decision to invade Greece, with its consideration of politics, rhetoric, and religion, is, if not as thrilling, at least as telling. It tells the standard narrative of the conflict between East and West, and it tells of many ways in which the conflict was more complicated than that. It tells not just how the Greeks and Persians came to fight each other, but who the Greeks and Persians were that they might have fought, or not, but did.

On Saturday 10 June 2016, the Ambassador of the Hellenic Republic to the UK, Mr. Konstantinos Bikas, and the Classics in Communities project hosted a conference celebrating the teaching of Greek language and culture in the UK at the Hellenic Centre in London. The conference had multiple aims: to bring together a variety of teachers, committees and associations to discuss the state of Greek language and culture education in the UK; to anticipate and confront the challenges; and to collaborate to find solutions and action plans for its survival and growth.

Nearly every – no, every – Greek grammar and course book, even the most comprehensive (in English, at any rate), gives a very skimpy, perfunctory and unhelpful account — insofar as it gives any account at all – of what ‘aspect’ is and how exactly it is related to verb tense and time (which tend to be conflated). Most of the books and articles on the subject of the aspect of the Greek verb are accessible only to the professional philologist, and can't therefore be easily applied by non-specialists to the understanding of the actual usage of Greek writers or to the imitation of their usage when translating into their language. This article sets out to remedy this situation by giving a clear and (within limits) comprehensive explanation of aspect as it applies to the Greek verb.

Way back in the late 70's when I was studying Classics at Cambridge, I had to take some courses on Roman Britain. Try as my lecturers would, they could not make it sexy. Not compared to debauched Rome and sun-soaked Greece…