During my second placement on the PGCE in Latin with Classics, the Head of Classics explained the curriculum plan for Latin, and the use of the WJEC Level 1 Certificate in Latin which she had implemented for the students in Year 9. She was keen for the students to receive recognition for their effort in Latin and yet concerned that the pressure of an additional external exam might detract from the students’ enjoyment of the subject. I was unaware of the possibility for external exams outside of GCSE and A Level and I was fascinated by what role the certificate might play for the students as they progressed through their education.

The objective of this case study is to consider the role of pupil talk in the translation of Latin. I consider that ‘talk’ within the Latin classroom is an important pedagogical tool to support the development of pupil knowledge and understanding and to promote independent learning. Firstly, I am particularly interested in pupils’ early acquisition of the Latin language through ‘talk’. In this study, I wanted to explore how they use talk to support each other and the issues they encounter, the use of available and additional support resources and the extent of grammatical terminology within their talk. With the latter, I was curious to investigate how much terminology infiltrated pupils’ speech, or indeed if it was absent, and the subsequent effect both of these might have. The oral translation of Latin is an accepted and traditional part of learning for pupils. Throughout my PGCE teacher training course, I have observed that the majority of pupils frequently and independently consult or choose to work with another pupil when translating. I considered it was both a valid and valuable learning strategy to explore and analyse in some depth. Such research would provide a constructive insight into this accepted but sometimes overlooked learning tool, and therefore could realistically inform and improve my future teaching practice. Lastly, research into pupil talk has its own intrinsic worth, as transcripts provide both thought-provoking and informative evidence of their own. Thus, I was keen, within my placement school, to discover and consider how the pupils responded and talked about the language together in pairs.

In a 2015 interview with the Chronicle for Higher Education, prolific scholar Anthony Grafton showed a reluctance to call himself a writer that surprised many readers: “I've never felt I could claim to be a writer in that full sense” he confessed (Toor, 2015). I have heard similar admissions from many of my friends and colleagues in classics; we see ourselves as teachers and researchers, not as writers. When we stop to consider our work, though, it is obvious that writing makes up an enormous part of our workload: we write not just articles, abstracts, books, and book reviews, but also course descriptions, syllabi, letters of recommendation, grant proposals, and those ‘statements of research interest’ that haunt job candidates annually. Whether or not we feel comfortable claiming the label ‘writer’, writing is, undeniably, a central part of our professional lives.

Hearing impairment and Latin are not usually something that we pair together, yet it could be seen as an appealing GCSE to a hearing-impaired student. On the one hand learning Latin as an additional language may be seen as difficult when the student is still trying to learn and develop their first language. On the other hand learning Latin does not have, nor require, any formal oral or aural assessment like most Modern Foreign Languages (MFL). My school is an 11-16 mixed comprehensive, where all pupils begin Latin in year 7 on timetable with the choice to continue in Year 8, from where it is taught as an off-timetable subject through to GCSE. Here I was introduced to teach a Year 10 boy who has congenital severe sensory-hearing loss in both ears and he wears two Nathos UP digital hearing aids all waking hours. I was immediately interested in his reasons for choosing to study Latin, especially as it is an elective GCSE timetabled before school and during lunch time. Prior to this encounter, I had recently attended a session on British Sign Language and the experience of Deaf and hearing-impaired students in school. Hearing about their experiences led me to think about the benefits of learning Latin, which consequently led me to investigate Kim's experience (name changed for confidentiality). I began focusing my observations on him and informally questioning his teachers; I was met by an array of praise stating that he proudly saw his hearing impairment as part of his identity rather than an obstacle. I started searching for information on teaching Latin to hearing-impaired pupils, but there was almost nothing specifically related to Latin. As a result, I saw this as my opportunity to collate my experiences and the experiences of the pupil and teacher to develop my research into something that may benefit other Latin teachers of hearing-impaired pupils.

This article is the second instalment of an exploration into teaching strategies in KS5 Classical Civilisation that started as a research project during the PGCE in 2015. I was particularly interested in determining what might be the most successful ways to approach the teaching of classical literature units. Many of the teachers and students I had spoken to expressed real concern about the volume of text to be covered and the amount of information for students to recall. Following the research I identified a number of ‘theories’ about how these challenges might be tackled and teaching strategies to address them, which I subsequently tested out in my first year of teaching. Below I recap the theories, explain the teaching strategies and activities that were trialled, and share my impressions of how and whether these worked in practice. Although many teachers will be familiar with these approaches, I hope that sharing the experience of trialling these in combination and the subsequent results may provoke consideration or re-consideration. The theories and approaches were explored across two different classes of A Level students (approximately equal numbers of male and female) studying Iliad (AS- 6 students) and Greek Tragedy (A2- 5 students) at an independent school for boarders and day pupils aged 13–18.

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.

The difficulties which students can encounter when making the transition from school or college to university are widely recognised. In some ways, of course, starting university should bring new challenges. Higher education is so called because it takes learners beyond what they have done at school, exposing them to new material and new ideas, and helping them to grow and develop in new ways. But it is in the interests of the students themselves, their school teachers, their university tutors and society at large to help them progress as smoothly as possible from the one environment to the other. Bridging the gap successfully enables students to make the most of their university education, rather than floundering needlessly.

Students are arriving to study Latin at university with an increasingly diverse range of qualifications (including no Latin at all). This is something to celebrate. University Classics departments want students from different educational backgrounds; and we want a wide range of qualification authorities to continue to offer students the chance to start learning Latin at school. This diversity is being exacerbated, however, by an increasingly stark differential in the content and rigour of these various qualifications; and that presents challenges for universities aiming to integrate students quickly and acclimatise them to university-style learning. Classes in all subjects have more and less knowledgeable students learning side-by-side; but the dynamics of a Latin language class mean that gaps in knowledge and differences in experience become publicly visible very quickly. This is thus a social problem as much as it is an academic one, and it is particularly acute during that important period of transition, the first year of university study. This trend is not exclusive to the teaching of Latin but has also been a recurring theme of discussion within Modern Languages too, particularly in Scottish universities where the percentage of non-A Level students is higher than is generally the case south of the border.

In spite of its world-wide reach, the International Baccalaureate (IB) is still a relatively unknown quantity in many schools in the UK. Even if teachers know of the IB, very few teachers know how it works and even fewer have actually taught it. As a result, not enough Classicists realise how beneficial the IB can be for the teaching of Latin. This article aims at highlighting three main reasons why Classics teachers should be championing the International Baccalaureate in their sixth forms.

Examination questions (‘Give the context of the following …’) testing a knowledge of 1. above used to be much more common than they are now. Your answer showed how well you knew the text and how ‘significant’ the extract from the text was. The problem - if you knew the text well - was where to stop, going backwards, and how far to go, going forwards. It was not quite as easy as it sounds.