This is not a hypothetical situation. A friend (and former student) of mine will be traveling to China this summer to teach Biblical Hebrew to a group of about 50 students (who are mostly pastors). The facts (as I know them):

1. Number of students: 50 adults
2. Time frame: 10 class days (2 weeks), 6-8 hours per day
3. Cover the material for a “typical” first semester course (we can talk about what that “should” include)
4. Language of students: Mandarin (so that means limited instructional material that is published)

They do have access to a Mandarin version of Weingreen. How would you use that?

What would you include, exclude, simplify or condense? What about quizzes, exams? How many, when? What about homework?

What would you want these students to leave the two weeks being able to do?

And …. how much of that could you do with a communicative method?

Go.

Daniel & Tonya have posted the first installment of their “hypothetical” syllabus for teaching Biblical Hebrew to a group of adults. They describe the class (and participants) this way:

This hypothetical Hebrew class is offered through and meets at a hypothetical, local Baptist church. All the hypothetical students are members or attenders of the church. They all have hypothetical jobs, hypothetical families, and many other hypothetical obligations. The class will meet for two hypothetical hours in the evening once per week for twenty weeks.

An overview of the entire syllabus is here. It’s actually not completely hypothetical. They did teach this course a few times and the only thing that is hypothetical is that they combined the experiences of all the sections taught into one description.

I’ll be interested to read why they choose to include (or exclude) certain material. I hope we can then move on to define a hypothetical seminary course (for a particular student population) and discuss the content for that course. Along the way, we’ll probably talk about resources and methodology to implement these courses.

UPDATES:
B&T continue with Syllabus – Vol. 2 here.

[I’m being a bit antagonistic on purpose with that title to get some reactions, but only a bit!]

Tonya & Daniel (bloggers at Hebrew & Greek Reader) asked me a question about communicative methodology in learning Hebrew when they interviewed me. After that, Seumas MacDonald wrote a four-piece essay (here, here, here, and here) on “Conversational” “Dead” languages which generated some good comments and led me to Daniel Streett’s work. Rather than bog down Seumas’ blog with a lengthy response, I’ve decided to bring my further comments here to my own blog. Mike Aubrey also has a lot to say (here and here) in response to Daniel & Tonya’s own posts on their blog (here and here) in response to Seumas. I know I’m missing some other contributors to this current discussion (but I’m not leaving them out intentionally)! I think we need a flow-chart to follow the conversations.

For those who may not be familiar with the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), you can read about the work of the Cohelet Project here. They have provided a very good summary of the goals and methodology of CLT. Paul Overland and his team have been working very hard to integrate SLA research into a program that is primarily driven by the communicative approach to language learning. Randall Buth has been running Biblical Hebrew ulpans for years (and is now also offering Greek ulpans). Randall is also part of the design team for the Cohelet Project.

Bottom line? Continue reading →