Greek Teaching – Week One Strategy

Greek Teaching – Week One Strategy September 29, 2009

[Disclaimer: much of this advice is geared towards an urban campus where most students have full-time job outside of their educational work]

I think I mentioned before that I have chosen Clayton Croy’s A Primer of Biblical Greek for my class, as it is very basic and the seminary has used it many times before.

What to do the first week [we meet once a week for three hours, over 10 weeks]?

These classes can be very scary for students who have never studied a language, especially one in a different script.

My goal for the first week is to keep it basic, introduce the letters and their pronunciation, and get them comfortable with the foreignness of it all.  I am purposely taking it easy for the first two weeks.  This is partly because it is conceivable that some students may decide to join the course in the second week and I don’t want to already be on chapter 5 or something.  I plan to do two chapters a session starting week 3.  That way, we are just about half-way through the book at the end of the first quarter.

I’d like to spend about half an hour on just trying to pronounce words in Greek from the NT (which is an exercise in Croy, ch. 1).  This is important because I know students in their final year of the MDIV who still don’t really know how to pronounce Greek words!  Sad.  Also, studies have shown that the better students are at pronunciation, they are in a better place to retain grammatical information.  So, do as much out-loud work as you can!

Explaining diphthongs can sometimes be a challenge, but the key is to continue demonstrating pronunciation and how they act as one vowel in syllabification.

I have decided, as a first week devotional, to simply point out the alliteration of the use of kappa words in Philippians 3.2.  It is not glamorous, but it is certainly intentional on Paul’s part and is poetic in Greek in a way it is not in English, of course.  Anyone else have ideas?


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