Latin in Action - Home

This website is Timothy Hill's online realisation of Susanna Phillippo's Latin in Action materials which were designed for teaching beginners' Latin with original texts by means of a teaching method which integrated comparative translations. Susanna Phillippo developed this approach at Newcastle University as a History, Classics and Archaeology (HCA) Subject Centre Teaching Development Grant (TDG) holder; working with her fellow members of staff Teresa Saunders and Jakob Wisse. That project report is available from the HCA website. The Latin in Action materials were adapted for online use by Tim Hill (KCL) with a JISC Distributed E-Learning Phase 2 (DEL2) grant, which enabled the addition of linked grammatical assistance by Cressida Ryan (University of Nottingham).

The approach adopted by Latin in Action – as explained further under About LIA – is intended to teach basic language and translation skills along with higher level interpretive skills. This is so that

• students may independently engage with original texts (their aim in learning the language) as soon as possible and
• students may come to see translations as a tool to work with, or an indicator of where attention should be particularly paid to the original

For this reason the approach may be particularly useful for postgraduate beginners, and if you are doing something similar, or decide to try this at that level Classics in the Subject Centre (CSC) would like to hear from you.

All the materials on this site are free for use by students and teachers: either together as a course, or as individual authors/passages/exercises – in which form it may be useful for Intermediate Latin revision, or as an alternative source of grammatical explanations. If you do use any of the materials, either as a student or as a teacher, or consider doing so, please let CSC know (by filling in the online feedback or contacting Eleanor OKell (CSC Academic Coordinator and Project Leader for Latin in Action Online)), so that we can assess their impact and build up a set of ‘hints and tips' for future users. If you use these materials to teach with or adopt the method or the you may be eligible to submit.

The Latin in Action website with pop-up windows for individual items was developed by Timothy Hill as the easiest way to replicate having a text, grammatical assistance, translations and comprehension questions all available “to hand” on one handout or on a desktop. In converting the materials to the virtual desktop of the computer screen a key consideration was to prevent the kind of undue scrolling that would occur by uploading A4 handouts intact. Nevertheless, if you prefer to work offline with print versions, these may be viewed online or downloaded in pdf format. The text can be copied from the pdfs, should you wish to edit it or create single files.