Challenging spoken Latin: which ‘language use’ do you mean?

Eduardo M. Engelsing (Western Washington University)

New findings and perspectives in Applied Linguistics shift permanently the place where the language learning process is supposedly nested. Chomsky (1957) called the attention to creative faculties located in the child/learner’s brain, while Hymes (1971) emphasized the relevance of external factors in any communicative encounter. Recently, the so-called “socio-cultural turn in second language acquisition” (Block 2003) underlies the preponderance of interactional and semiotic dimensions to language learning.

The aim of this paper is to characterize what means to use a language in an interactional way and to show its relevance to the preparation of pedagogical material and to the teaching of classes. Despite ongoing changes in the understanding of “language use”, practitioners of spoken Latin normally defend it as a general opposition to the mainstream morph-syntactical emphasis in the classical languages pedagogy, without taking into account that “language in use” is not an unproblematic term in linguistic theory, and that it varies as much as there are different areas theorizing on language.

By briefly examining two well-known active methods of Latin – W. H. D. Rouse’s teaching practice in the Perse School on the one hand, and Ørberg`s Lingua Latina per se Illustrata on the other – we show how pedagogical materials whose focus apparently lies on “use” can still be founded by and foster a formalistic view of language.

Other than criticize spoken Latin, our goal is to enhance its potentialities. For this purpose, we strengthen the necessity to be fully informed by the interdisciplinary enterprise which endeavors to describe the “proprieties of language in use”, and which sees “learning” and “use” in an irremediable connection. We conclude our presentation by showing some pedagogical experiences having a fruitful dialogue with current Applied Linguistics research.