Yesterday’s sessions at the Pedagogy Workshop in Communicative Biblical Hebrew split their time between sample teaching/learning experiences and discussion, both theoretical and practical, of teaching biblical Hebrew using Second Language Acquisition methods.

In yesterday’s post on the workshop’s first day, I briefly described the functional, rather than grammatical, course structure that the Cohelet materials use. Yesterday’s workshop sessions made it even more clear, though, that the approach doesn’t ignore or devalue grammar—it simply doesn’t make grammar the deciding factor in how to organize course material. Instead, SLA methods organize material by communicative tasks, and teachers introduce grammatical forms as needed to achieve certain kinds of tasks.

For example, the Cohelet materials begin with the very basic communicative task of introducing oneself, asking about another’s שָׁלוֹם, and taking leave of another. By the end of the first day of a Cohelet-style class, students might feel quite ready to read 2 Kings 4:26:

‏… הֲשָׁלוֹם לָךְ הֲשָׁלוֹם לְאִישֵׁךְ הֲשָׁלוֹם לַיָּלֶד וַתֹּאמֶר שָׁלוֹם׃

However, if a puppet Gehazi and a puppet Shunammite woman were to have the conversation above, students at the end of the first day of a Cohelet-style class should understand it.

After that, the Cohelet strategy teaches students how to talk about the present, using participles and infinitive constructs with prefixed ל. A fanciful retelling of the story of Jonah serves as a vehicle for introducing these grammatical forms. Imperatives also come in very early, although students won’t learn to analyze them until rather later in the course. For example:

:אֱלֹהִים — אֲנִי מְבַקֵּשׁ נָבִיא

!יוֹנָה — אֲנִי נָבִיא

:אֱלֹהִים — קוּם … לֵךְ אֶל נִינְוֵה

??יוֹנָה — עוֹד? אֵינֶנִּי מֵבִין: אֶל נִינְוֵה

Note that this dialogue, introduced very early in the course, also gives students some basic tools to use in class. They quickly learn that they can say “?עוֹד” to have the instructor repeat something, or that they can say “אֵינְנִּי מֵבִין” if they don’t understand something.

The Cohelet materials spend about three units on present-tense communicative functions, and then introduce the yiqtol form as future indicative. (Other uses of the yiqtol wait until later.) A teacher following the Cohelet strategy will introduce one yiqtol form at a time. The student manual does include the full present-tense yiqtol paradigm for the sample strong verb שׁ.מ.ר (the dots indicating that the trilteral root rather than an inflected form is in view), but focuses on only one inflected form at a time, rather than asking students to memorize the paradigm and immediately apply it to various situations. Students first gain experience using the 3mp form, then the 3ms form, then 3fp, 3fs, and so on until they have seen all of the gender/number combinations in action. The example portions of Wednesday’s workshop focused on the yiqtol and the imperative.

In the sessions where we discussed pedagogy, two of the instructions (one from the design team and one from the field test team) supplied us with the course outlines that they have used when teaching using the Cohelet manual. As it stands right now, the Cohelet materials get you through about one quarter or semester, but the design team aims to have the second semester’s worth of materials prepared in time for the 2009–2010 school year.

The final session on Wednesday focused on standards recommended by the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages, and showed us where and how the Cohelet materials and its SLA approach line up with these standards. One of our guild’s shortcomings, in my opinion, is that we churn out Ph.D.s hoping that they will land jobs in higher education, and knowing that most will end up at small-to-medium-sized colleges and universities where they will be expected to each three or four classes per semester (mutatis mutandis for institutions on a quarter system), and yet many (if not most) Ph.D. programs in biblical studies (or, indeed, in most academic fields) include no training in pedagogy. Our Ph.D. programs in most academic fields, biblical studies included, teach content, research skills, and writing skills, but few teach pedagogical theory, skills, and best practices. We don’t usually contextualize our Hebrew and Greek instruction within the scope of teaching “foreign languages,” but by acting as if we’re doing something fundamentally different from a teacher of modern Spanish or German or Arabic or Russian, we cut ourselves off from rich resources and often deprive our students of valuable educational experiences. I’m at this workshop to help remedy some of that in my own teaching of Hebrew.