>The question: how should teachers in Christian Colleges approach the
>teaching of Greek? How many different alternative approaches are there, and
>what are the benefits and problems of each?
There is a long post from me in the archives praising the text I use,
_Greek_To_Me, by Cullen and Lyle Story, so I won't go back thru all of that
again...you're welcome... (-:
But to give you an example of what my students accomplish in one year of
college level Greek: in addition to going through the entire Grammar,
translating 20 graduated stories from Greek to English (at the end of
each chapter, with the last five or six being as difficult as median level
NT portions), they memorize all the words which occur 20x or more in the
NT (thanks to GTM's mnemonic memory devices), and then translate the
entire Gospel of Mark...all in ONE year. At the end of the second year
I give them 13 review quizzes which cover ALL the vocabulary and ALL (and
I mean ALL) the various declensions, parsings, etc. For the bulk of this
material it is the fifth or sixth time they have had it on some test.
Out of 18 students this year (a small class this year, normally its between
25 and 30), 11 of them scored 90% or better on all 13 of the final review
quizzes. Of the other 7, 5 of them scored between 80%-90% on only one of
the quizzes, with the rest above 90%. The other two had only 2 quizzes
where they below 90%.
Some other Greek Profs scoff at the text because it uses cartoons to
help the students learn, but I'd put my students up against anyones after
one year (and have, and mine can read circles around them virtually
anywhere in the NT). The best thing about having students read this much
Greek is that they get to see and understand how Greek works in concrete
situations, not in the abstract; so I can constantly reinforce the difference
between Greek and English in the use of the article (eg., Apollonius' Canon,
etc.), Indirect Discourse, Conditional/Concessive Circumstantial Ptcs,
identifying which of two Accusatives is the subject of an Inf, Narrative
use of Impf vs Aor followed by Historical Presents, the "fluidity" of the
preposition in Koine, unusual uses of cases and tenses, as well as talk
about how the various types of verbs actually work in the various tenses
(eg., contracts, liquids, irregulars, etc.), Conditional Sentences, etc.,
etc., etc.
As far as the drawbacks of other approaches, the only MAJOR problem I find
in other grammars (not all of the them; eg., Mounce supplements with readings,
our bgreek brother Prof Ward Powers does similarly with an inductive approach
to Mark) is that they give students nonsense Greek <--> English to translate,
which IMHO doesn't build a correct sense of how language functions, ie.,
in contexts. A corollary to this is the overemphasis on lengthy, detailed
grammatical discussions to the exclusion of vocabulary acquisition and
reading/translating REAL Greek stories. As Captain Kirk once said, "We
learn by doing !"; that's the way, I think, Greek students learn to
read/translate Greek...they DO it, not theorize about it.
My $0.02...
XAIREIN...
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Dale M. Wheeler, Ph.D.
Research Professor in Biblical Languages Multnomah Bible College
8435 NE Glisan Street Portland, OR 97220
Voice: 503-251-6416 FAX:503-254-1268 E-Mail: dalemw@teleport.com
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