Common Ground: Second Language Acquisition Goes to the Classroom will become, in this reviewer's estimation, the go-to resource for language educators looking to ground their practice in the evidence currently available in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research. Thus, it not only fills an important gap for world language educators looking for an accessible, practical introduction to the findings of SLA. As the authors note, too often pedagogy texts err either on not introducing enough of the contemporary learning science to be evidence-based or lack sufficient discussion of classroom implementation to be truly useful – but does so in an exemplary way. Accordingly, in this review I aim to outline and emphasise its merits and encourage its use among educators of Greek and Latin rather than point to its (few) shortcomings. I have every expectation that it will become a standard resource for Latin and Greek teachers who wish to start (and deepen) their engagement with SLA.
First, I'll say a bit about the form of the text, as it is a particular strength. The authors, Florencia Henshaw (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Maris Hawkins (Capitol Hill Day School), helpfully divide each chapter according to the needs of the practising language educator. Each chapter has three sections. The first, What do I need to know?, distills the current SLA research on important key research areas (for example, on acquisition, input, output, communicative modes, etc.) into summarised findings. These findings, in turn, motivate a practical, hands-on description of several tasks, routines, and assessments in world language classrooms informed by these findings. This section is referred to as What does it look like in the classroom? Last, building on nearly a century of educational psychology, the authors ask us to actively reflect on our learning in each chapter using action prompts in sections entitled Now that you know…
The form of the text exemplifies the careful attention to practising language educators aiming to inform (and reform) their language pedagogy that appears on every page of this text. As noted above, this is one of the truly exemplary things about this book, and one of the things that will make it an ideal text to read in a community of practising language educators, classical and modern.
I would next like to focus on some of the specific chapters themselves, and, in particular, on some of the summary findings from SLA that Henshaw and Hawkins expertly situate.
First, Henshaw and Hawkins provide one of the best accessible introductions to some of the guiding principles of SLA that I've seen in a language pedagogy book. Part of this has to do with their attention to laying the foundation and defining terms. One of the most helpful definitions they set out is for acquisition itself. The authors define acquisition as ‘the (mostly) implicit process of building a linguistic system by making form-meaning connections from the input’. Helpfully, they summarise this definition as ‘acquisition is what happens to you while you're busy understanding messages’. (p.3)
This definition allows them to avoid common pitfalls for implementing SLA in language pedagogy. One of those pitfalls is to think that SLA-inspired pedagogy simply suggests a new set of ‘activities’ that can be applied in a traditional, form-focused language learning course. (In Latin and Greek circles: the ‘grammar and translation’ method.) The authors’ careful attention to the role of input in their definition of acquisition helps to dispel this common misunderstanding. By focusing our attention on the acquisition of language by learners rather than knowledge about language, SLA, as I shall discuss in a moment, asks language educators to ask deeper questions about what they might be doing, or not doing, to facilitate the actual acquisition of language proficiency in their classrooms.
In a related way, Henshaw and Hawkins ask that we carefully consider the goals of our language pedagogy and the way we might assess whether our students have met those goals should also facilitate the sort of deeper thinking that educators looking to introduce themselves to SLA should engage in. For, if our aim in language education is the acquisition of proficiency in a language (reading, writing, speaking, listening), we have to ask then how we (i) have our students engage in activities and practise evidence-based tasks and skills that bring about that acquisition and (ii) how we would assess our students for evidence of acquisition. This questioning is foundational, as many language classrooms (not just Latin and Greek ones) have fielded assessments that assess for knowledge about (explicit grammar) and little in the way of acquisition or proficiency (acquisition).
In keeping with the form of this book, however, this sort of foundational curricular work is paired with helpful ways forward at each stage. For example, at the end of the goals and assessment chapter the authors include a fantastic introduction to a proficiency-oriented assessment model, the ‘Integrated Performance Assessment’ model developed by the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). This helpfully keeps the focus on the how-to of SLA and, as a proponent of IPAs myself, contains one of the most helpful step-by-step introductions to them I've seen.
I want to highlight in particular one more chapter – the chapter on the famous ‘Input Hypothesis’, part of linguist Stephen Krashen's so-called ‘Monitor Model’ developed in the 1970s and 80s – for its clarity and precision. And, specifically, I want to bring to the fore Henshaw and Hawkins’ helpful distillation of the now, at this point, nearly 50 years of SLA research. Comprehensible Input – language that is able to be ‘processed for meaning’ by the learner (p.67) – is universally held to be necessary for acquisition to take place. (It may not be sufficient – this is still debated.) As Henshaw and Hawkins summarise later, ‘without input, and without understanding the input, there is no acquisition’ (p.69).
This summary finding of the research helps to point to the stakes involved. For Latin and Greek educators, we must find ways to make Latin and Greek comprehensible for our students if we wish to, as we normally claim, have our students read Latin and Greek. As many other authors have noted in Classics pedagogy fora, we ignore this research at our own (and our students’) peril. Reading is an activity that one who has acquired or is acquiring the language can do as they understand messages; mechanical translation is not, in fact, reading, as understood.
Last, for the Classics educator who has wondered throughout why I have been so sparing in my references to the unique challenges faced by Latin and Greek educators, Common Ground does a beautiful job in discussing the available evidence on this question. Remarkably, Latin and Greek – or any human language for that matter – are importantly different in how they are learned and acquired. Accordingly, part of the (un) learning process for Latin and Greek educators is to see just how much our work shares in common with contemporary world language education.
In sum, this is a remarkable book. In under 200 pages it introduces the language educator to the very best of the available SLA research, provides helpful, practical, ready-made classroom strategies, tasks, and assessments for the practising world language educator, and asks each of us to reflect carefully on what we're learning. It asks us to ask some of the most fundamental questions about language instruction and why we do it. It is a perfect complement to conversations that have been occurring in Classical languages fora for decades. I heartily recommend it as a departmental read, paired with articles from Jacqueline Carlon, Robert Patrick, and Justin Slocum Bailey (for starters), and engagement with the growing collection of Latin and Greek novellas aimed at providing comprehensible input to early learners.
Open access
