As a Latin teacher, I think a lot about reading. Without texts I would not have a subject to teach, and the goal of many Latin programs (including my own) is teaching students to read Latin texts. I began my Latin teaching career while teaching the language to myself as well. The goal (both for myself and my students) was to read Latin confidently and fluidly, from left to right, processing the meaning of the words as my eye scanned the pages. Yet my good intentions were soon frustrated, and I was baffled by a problem which I soon realised was not unique to my situation: despite years of training, neither I nor my students could read Latin in a natural, fluid way. Furthermore, textbooks and colleagues seemed resigned to the view that such a goal was unrealistic or unobtainable. Best to treat language as a puzzle to be solved, or linguistic knot to be untangled, rather than a language expressing a message. Only the most intellectually gifted students continued in my ‘puzzle-solving’ course; consequently, my enrolment dropped off steeply after the second year. Looking for more help, I even implemented various ‘rules for reading’ and ‘reading strategies’ advocated by others, yet rather than improve student reading ability, I felt my curriculum begin to feel increasingly cluttered with activities and processes that stole away from my students the valuable time needed to interact with the language itself. It was not until I began investigating the field of Second Language Acquisition (hereafter SLA) that I discovered some simple, yet fundamental principles about language that helped explain my students’ struggles and helped me rethink language teaching in general.

中文翻译：

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legere discitur legendo：拉丁语课堂的泛读

作为一名拉丁老师，我对阅读有很多想法。没有课本，我就没有要教的科目，许多拉丁语课程（包括我自己的）的目标是教学生阅读拉丁语课本。我开始了我的拉丁语教学生涯，同时也自学了这门语言。目标（对我自己和我的学生都是如此）是从左到右自信而流畅地阅读拉丁语，在我的眼睛扫描页面时处理单词的含义。然而，我的好意很快就落空了，我很快意识到这并不是我的情况所独有的一个问题：尽管经过多年的培训，我和我的学生都无法以自然、流畅的方式阅读拉丁文。此外，教科书和同事似乎已经接受了这样的观点，即这样的目标是不现实的或无法实现的。最好把语言当成一个难题来解决，或语言结被解开，而不是表达信息的语言。只有最聪明的学生才能继续我的“解谜”课程；因此，第二年之后我的入学率急剧下降。在寻求更多帮助的情况下，我什至实施了其他人提倡的各种“阅读规则”和“阅读策略”，但没有提高学生的阅读能力，我觉得我的课程开始越来越杂乱无章，越来越多的活动和过程从我的学生身上偷走与语言本身交互所需的宝贵时间。直到我开始研究第二语言习得（以下简称 SLA）领域，我才发现了一些关于语言的简单但基本的原则，这些原则有助于解释我的学生的困难，并帮助我重新思考语言教学。