Reviving a Dead Language via Technology
By Chelsea Roidt
When people hear that I teach Latin, most of them have the same reaction: Isn’t that a dead language? This inexplicably launches me into a flurry of reasoning as to how the language is still alive and Romance languages and English derivatives and how I even used it in the title of this article. It is from this constant and repetitive scene that the idea for my action research arose. I wanted to actually prove that an emphasis on technology-based vocabulary retention strategies in a world language classroom could have a positive effect on the amount of English derivatives that a student learned. Along with saving me some explaining, proving a statistical correlation between those two variables would open the doors to a department meeting about how important this relationship is to students looking to take the ACT or SAT in high school and even the GRE in the future and what our role as a world language department should be in that pursuit of English vocabulary.
I started my study by asking teachers in my department what types of technology-based strategies they used most commonly in the classroom and found that Quizlet and Google apps had the most utilization when it came to teaching vocabulary, with Kahoot, DuoLingo, and Quizizz close behind. Because I want to expand this study to the entire department eventually, I stuck to the strategies thatteachers were most used to in order to make the procedure easier for everyone down the road. Predominantly using those two platforms, I included no less than 75 minutes of technology-based vocabulary retention strategies in my Latin 3 classroom each week with an additional emphasis on corresponding English derivatives as well as the target language vocabulary of the unit. Students responded well within the lessons to the built-in activities of Quizlet and enjoyed the creativity that was incorporated with the projects assigned within Google apps such as Docs and Slides.