In the larger context of traditional language teaching, it might be difficult to figure out how to incorporate communicative language learning into your own classroom. One of the great things about Angela’s work is that nobody needs to feel like choosing between traditional grammar translation methods vs communicative methods is a zero sum decision. Teachers are free to incorporate both together as they find something useful in their own teaching context.

Something that came up in the comments on the post for Lesson 1 was pronunciation. The pronunciation scheme Angela uses is in one sense Erasmian, but it is also not what most American or British students learn as Erasmian (which is usually just English consonants and vowels mapped onto the Greek alphabet). Rather, it is a historical reconstruction from the tradition of Erasmus’ reconstruction of Classical Greek. Christophe Rico has a great discussion of it at the Polis Institute website. He emphasizes that this pronunciation, in the historical development of Greek is grounded in the early Koine period before many of the phonological changes present in, for example Randall Buth’s reconstruction, had taken place.

Pronunciations—accents—are very personal and they are wrapped up in our identities. But pronunciations have also always been diverse. Whether we are Australian, American, English, Irish, South African, Indian, or Canadian, we all have identity tied to how we speak, but we also share English with each other as a language of wider communication. American alone has an incredible diversity of English dialects, each unique (see this excellent 3 part series on YouTube). Postclassical Greek was also just such a language of wider communication and we can celebrate a diversity of accents. We can also strive to understand each other, even if we say things differently.

Biblical Greek – Lesson 2 – Singular feminine nouns, adjectives and article

Here are scripts for Lessons 2 and Vocabulary for Lesson 2