Homework is very important in the role of learning any foreign language. A student needs the practice and the repetition to fully grasp the information. Certain assignments are helpful in this, like when students are learning suffixes or vocabulary. Memorizing the suffixes on their own and practicing them on real words is helpful. But for too often, the teachers provide assignments that are too heavy and the work gets redundant. "Busy work" as students call it is a large issue that turns a lot of students off of schoolwork. One can only conjugate so many verbs or decline so many nouns before his or her brain fries, as I have much experience with.
Latin has so many different endings and situations where the repetition is necessary to learn what to use and when. But with this example, and for all other languages, it is important to know why that ending goes on that word in that situation for a full grasp of the language. If the students just go through the motions of putting "-itis" on the end of a verb when it is second person plural because they are told to, they will not know what to do when they see "amitis"and have to translate it on their own.
Homework is necessary and helpful to learn a language if it is implemented properly. Homework is like Goldilocks and the three bears. Too little serves no purpose because the students do not get enough exposure. Too much and the students can get overwhelmed or brain dead. The amount and the type has to be just right for the situation; and that is very hard to achieve.
Latin is an extremely hard language to grasp. I studied latin my senior year of high school and it was by far the hardest language due to the vast amount of grammar. I agree that a teacher needs to find the right amount of assignments with out overwhelming his/her students.
ReplyDeleteI had the "busy work" problem when I studied Latin. For some reason, Latin in particular seems to be a victim of constant mind-numbing homework assignments. This is most likely due to the fact that it is not much of a spoken language, and so teachers think that the best way to get their students to understand the written grammar is just to rewrite it again, and again, and again. In spoken languages, the homework tends to revolve around conversational exercises, like filling in the blanks of a two person conversation. Teachers need to remain creative in their homework assignments to avoid killing any interest their students had in the language.
ReplyDeleteI agree that just having grammar drills to practice over and over again becomes redundant and can almost be detrimental in some way. It why we should place focus into teaching language within a meaningful context for students to learn. And excellent example, I don't think I would ever think of homework in parallel to Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
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