Over the last 20 years in the United States a curious and likely unpredictable movement has been evolving in the way that we teach Latin and ancient Greek. A set of pedagogical principles known as Comprehensible Input (hereafter CI) has become a vehicle of change affecting our classrooms, our professional organisations and our teacher training programs as well as our relationships with and our positions in world language organisations. These changes to the teaching of classical languages were unpredictable because at the outset CI represented a set of hypotheses and then principles that even their progenitor, Stephen Krashen, thought of as the way into acquiring modern languages while teachers of classical languages had constructed a fortified wall around themselves built on the notion that Latin and ancient Greek were uniquely different from modern languages and, therefore, required different approaches. In many iterations of this wall, only a select cadre of students was thought (and easily demonstrated to be) capable of or even interested in mastering classical languages. This article will examine very briefly what this wave of change has been like in the Latin classrooms and institutions of the US and examine in particular the principles of Comprehensible Input: what they propose, how they are being practised in Latin classrooms, and the obstacles they encounter as well as opportunities they afford Latin programs which intend to survive and thrive in the coming years.

In November 2022, ChatGPT 3.5 was released on a public research preview, gaining notoriety for its ability to pull from a vast body of information to create coherent and digestible bodies of text that accurately respond to queries (OpenAI, 2022). It is able to recognise the grammar and vocabulary of ancient languages, translate passages, and compose texts at an alarmingly accurate and rapid rate. For teachers, this AI has had mixed reviews. Some fear its ability to produce well-written work effortlessly, while others are excited by its abilities to push the boundaries of current teaching practices. This paper explores how well ChatGPT explains grammatical concepts, parses inflected forms, and translates Classical Latin, Ancient Greek, and Classical Sanskrit. Overall, ChatGPT is rather good at working with Classical Latin and Sanskrit, but its abilities with Ancient Greek are deeply problematic. Although it is quite flawed at this time, ChatGPT, when used properly, could become a useful a tool for ancient language study. With proper guiding phrases, students could use this AI to practise vocabulary, check their translations, and rephrase grammatical concepts.

In France, recent curriculum reforms have signalled the cull of Latin and Greek from the secondary school curriculum – a teacher who criticised the reforms was censured; his blog disappeared. Belgium – because of the strength of its Catholic education long a beacon for Classical education – is witnessing schools dropping ancient languages in favour of STEM subjects at an alarming rate, driven similarly by the government agenda. As I am writing this article, I notice an online piece on the deteriorating situation in Malta, too. Throughout Europe, the financial crisis is spurring on governments and schools to intensify their push for STEM subjects – hailed as an instant fix for the faltering global economy – while vilifying less immediately practical subjects. A conversation with a French colleague who was lamenting the oppressing regime made me realise how well the UK is doing in comparison with other countries in Europe. Numbers of (state) secondary schools offering Latin are increasing, and thanks to the Department for Education, primary schools can offer Latin and Greek at Key Stage 2. Of course we should not delude ourselves: the number of secondary schools offering Latin is still low, the teaching of Greek is particularly disheartening, and only about 2% of all primary schools so far have opted to teach Latin and none (to my knowledge) have chosen Greek. Nevertheless, in comparison to the rest of Europe, a government which (whatever else one may think of it) supports the teaching of Classical languages, a growing number of hubs which see all levels of education collaborating creatively, and flourishing outreach organisations which offer financial and logistical support, give the UK at least some cause for optimism.

‘Gamification’ and games have become a popular trend in education, and have thus been given much attention in sessions at education conferences all over the world. But their rather rapid spread has also led to some misunderstandings about what they are and how they can be used in a classroom, largely owing to the wide variety of gamified courses and GBL-based classroom activities that have been popularised by educational media. Rather than serve as a panacea to fix classroom problems, however, gamification and GBL should be considered as just one of many tools, albeit quite powerful ones grounded in cognitive psychology, which can be used to create engaging and dynamic learning environments. After a short introduction to the ideas behind gamification and GBL and the brain science that makes them so powerful, an example of a gamified middle-school level Latin course will be described in detail.

During my PGCE I had a class of eight students in Year 11 studying for the OCR GCSE in Latin who had to master knowledge of 475 words for their exams. Their recent unseen translations demonstrated weak performances due to poor vocabulary knowledge. On interviewing the students, most lacked a systematic approach to learning vocabulary. Since the end-goal of studying Latin today is more often the reading of ancient texts, the requirements for vocabulary learning differs from that of other languages. Composing sentences in Latin is an increasingly rare skill too. Thus by rarely needing to produce Latin, students have no means of actively practising the language. Whilst students often find learning vocabulary arduous, I found that with Latin students find it particularly difficult to retain knowledge. In the school the GCSE Latin lessons are teacher-led and mostly involve the dissemination of information for the students to record and process. The pressure of covering the exam syllabus and difficulty of integrating vocabulary activities into this class led me to the possible solution presented by Memrise.

It's the first day of instruction following the holiday break, and you and your students are eagerly anticipating returning to the lengthy Latin reading required for the springtime exams. You take a step back to observe how your students are approaching a new text for the first time as they turn the page to the next selection from one of the canonical Roman authors. Each student dutifully has laid out before them the Latin text, their notebook, a pencil, a Latin dictionary, and any other references or charts they might find valuable in the moment.

The representation of the ‘dying Socrates’ was extremely popular among artists during the 17th and 18th centuries, while there are several artworks with this concept during the early 19th century. This article's main aim is to use the methodological tool of the Grammar of Visual Design in forming a teaching proposal based on the Harvard University ‘Artful Thinking Project’. This teaching proposal can be applied to a Language, a Philosophy or a History course. As a second aim, we propose a new typology for that era's artworks on the subject of the last moments of Socrates.

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?

It is commonly known that in Latin, the verb that means to teach (docere) takes a double accusative: you teach a subject and a student. After a Master's degree and 12 years of teaching at the secondary level, I feel like I am pretty good at teaching my subject. But what I have come to realise is that the Latin teacher training program I graduated from did not prepare me quite so well as to teach my students – in the sense that there was a very important aspect of teacher training missing from my program and, as far as I knew, every other program out there. I never formally learned the importance of an inclusive and affirming classroom and curriculum, or how to achieve it.

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.

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.

For the last few years, I have been working on an extensive digital model of ancient Rome as it appeared in the early 4th Century AD. This sort of visualisation lends itself to many applications in diverse fields: I am currently using it for research work into illumination and sightlines in the ancient city, have licensed it for broadcast in TV documentaries and publication in magazines, and am working with a computer games studio to turn it into an online game where players will be able to walk round the streets and buildings of the entire city (when not engaged in trading with or assassinating one another). Later this year I will be making a free online course, or MOOC, about the architecture of ancient Rome, which will largely be illustrated by this model.

Part way through the second school placement of my PGCE teacher training course I began to teach Latin unseen translation, where students are given an unfamiliar passage to translate, to a Year 13 cohort of just two students. The translation element of the course was proving challenging for both students – they struggled with language comprehension, and the A Level language course seems not very accessible to students with low prior attainment. Furthermore, my second placement school is an Upper School, so students start Latin from scratch in Year 9. Because of the time constraint those who choose take GCSE do the Eduqas Latin exam, which requires that slightly less grammar and syntax needs to be covered than the OCR syllabus (for example, the ablative absolute construction is absent from the Eduqas examination, but present in the OCR). For the small number carrying on in the 6th form, this results in a linguistic shortfall which has to be made up before beginning the OCR A Level specification. This seems to be a challenge even for very able Latinists, and more so for my two students, Alice and Michael (not their real names), and had presented an added barrier to their facility in grasping and translating complex language structures, both in unseen translations and the demanding set texts. Simply ‘practising’ by going through texts together was not proving helpful, as once my oral prompts during this process were removed and they were left on their own they reverted to guesswork instead of applying their knowledge and logic to the text. Similarly poor results in translation were evident from practice literature papers which they had taken before February half term, even though these were prepared texts – while the language paper asks students to tackle short unseen translations, the literature component calls for the extensive preparation of a much longer text, from which students must translate and analyse selected passages in the examination, as well as answering a broad essay question. However, despite the fact that Alice and Michael had been through their set text in detail with their teacher and made their own translations, it appeared that, when presented with a passage from the set text in exam conditions, the language looked just as intimidating to them as if they had not seen it before, and they were equally unable to produce a sensible attempt at translation. I therefore became interested in finding ways for them to approach texts which would minimise the ‘fear factor’ and allow them to access meaning without being put off by complex syntax.

Some years back, the English department for which I was Head of Key Stage 3 found that, due to a timetabling issue, Year 7s had an extra hour of English per fortnight. It seemed like a waste of an opportunity to pad this extra hour out with ‘more of the same’, so I made a decision to utilise that hour to teach something different - grammar.

With regards to the latest European Recommendations, developing key competences has become an important goal of education. The purpose of this comparative study is to focus on this topic considering the teaching of Latin and Greek in upper secondary school in Italy and Spain. A multiple case study with a mixed research design was used, with 173 students and 25 teachers as participants in the quantitative part and 40 students and 18 teachers in the qualitative part. The underlined results are a) the importance of working on the learning concepts of the students of Classics, as this influences the way they study b) the teaching factors that help pupils to develop key competences are evaluation, feedback, teacher personality, interactivity and discipline. Useful paths for daily teaching and new perspectives for future research in this field are offered.

It is safe to say that, across the globe, translation is still heavily relied on as a tool for teaching classical languages and texts that are written in them, both in secondary and higher education. Indeed, translation exercises are perhaps the most common method to train and evaluate Greek and Latin text comprehension, grammar, syntax and vocabulary. Some teachers and textbooks also make use of existing translations to complement and supplement the (more or less) original texts that they are tackling in class. Given that translation plays such a prominent role in Classics, is it not remarkable, then, that students generally spend very little time reflecting on the act of translation itself, not just as a shift between different languages, but as a transfer and transformation of meaning and form between different cultures?

The learning of ancient history at every level – school, FE and HE – offers its students the opportunity of close engagement with ancient evidence first hand. We want our students to develop the ability to approach texts and artefacts with confidence, to place them in context, and to cultivate their own perspectives on ancient history through engaging with them. We need to teach them that this process – the antithesis (or even the antidote?) to the quick-fix of Wikipedia or the Google search – is crucial to the methodology of the historian and is at the same time an exciting way of thinking about the past. Close engagement with inscriptions is a way of getting to the core matters of ancient history. In this article I set out the insights and opportunities that the study of inscriptions offers to those getting familiar with Greek antiquity at the pre-university stage; I consider the obstacles that teachers and students face when trying to access them and also the opportunities that modern publications (digital and traditional) offer to overcoming them.

My interest in undertaking a study relating to Classics and issues of diversity in the classroom is the result of several personal and circumstantial approaches to the subject, which have become more pronounced in my mind since the start of my Postgraduate Certificate of Education at the University of Cambridge.

This paper describes the development of a communicative test of Reading and Language Use for Classical Greek, aimed at students at CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) levels A1 and A2. A discussion is first provided of traditional pedagogical approaches which have for many decades dominated the teaching of classical languages, followed by suggestions why these may be supplanted with more modern communicative approaches. Focus then moves to assessment, where, it is suggested, methods are equally rooted in traditional, form-focused methods. If teaching is to become more communicative, it is argued, so should assessment. Against this backdrop, the development of a test of Reading and Language Use for students of Classical Greek at CEFR levels A1 and A2 is described.

This research project seeks to examine, using approaches drawn from a case study, how oral storytelling within the classroom can influence various aspects of narrative writing. Therefore, certain teaching strategies and oral activities were implemented in a sequence of lessons which aimed to develop the style and content base of students’ narrative writing.