Athenaze and Vocabulary Frequency

Rachael E. Clark (Garland High School, TX)

Everyone who has been in a Greek classroom, whether as student or teacher, can recite the litany of difficulties of learning Greek: an enormous number of forms, syntactical irregularities, and mind-boggling complexity. In such an environment, the burden of a new vocabulary can seem almost a secondary challenge and one which receives little attention or is simply ignored. Most textbooks for beginning Greek do not declare a rationale for their selection of vocabulary or provide it an ad hoc basis for the readings at hand. Greek vocabulary, however, can be an area which alleviates the strain of learning Greek, so a structured and coherent presentation of vocabulary benefits both teachers and students.

Because the core vocabulary of Greek is so much smaller than that of Latin or other languages, an awareness of how high frequency vocabulary corresponds to that in a textbook helps both teachers and students. As it stands, there is a great need for support materials geared to specific textbooks which prioritize vocabulary in a productive and meaningful manner. This paper presents some preliminary work toward the broader goal of providing teachers with vocabulary aids for commonly used Greek textbooks.

As perhaps the most widely used “reading approach” textbook, Athenaze is a good candidate for such support. This paper is based on four vocabulary lists: correspondence of the vocabulary lists in Athenaze with (1) the 50% core vocabulary (lemmas which on average make up 50% of Greek texts) and (2) an 80% list. An additional pair of lists (3-4) analyzes how the core vocabulary is introduced, paced and distributed throughout the book. Some material will be presented on a handout and the rest will be available for download online.