At WCC, it’s the only way our students study the language, spending two years (sixteen course hours) “trying to recap in an accelerated way the natural sequence of events, which happens in the acquisition of our own mother tongue.”

Professor Nancy Llewellyn, architect of the College’s immersion method program, believes that the spoken word is absolutely fundamental when it comes to learning a language. “In my class we’re not so much concerned with learning to speak as with speaking to learn,” she says. And while roughly half her incoming students have had little or no high school Latin, an elementary grasp comes quickly to them. “Learning language is a natural activity,” says Professor Llewellyn, who is known to her students simply as Magistra (“instructress” in Latin). “We do it naturally, simply and frequently as play.”

 

Indeed, “play” is a key part of Professor Llewellyn’s teaching style. She is an active, demonstrative teacher who makes liberal use of common household items and games to familiarize her students with the idea of going from a thing (or concept) directly to the Latin word, rather than through the English.  It is not uncommon to see the students playing Latin Pictionary or Clue, or bantering with their magistra about the rubber chicken that seems to have become the Latin classes’ ever-present mascot.

High Praise
Language proficiency can be a difficult thing to quantify, but the College has made use of several outside sources in an effort to verify its students’ progress. In early May 2009, Dr. David Morgan, a Professor at Furman University who is currently working on the Morgan Dictionary of Neo-Latin, conducted interviews in Latin with all Wyoming Catholic College’s sophomores, evaluating them by means of the Oral Proficiency Guidelines developed by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). Dr. Morgan, who has been teaching for the past 22 years at Princeton, Columbia, and (most recently) Furman, was highly impressed by their proficiency.

 

“I doubt if students at any American college or university achieve a superior level in Latin, over the same period of instruction, as those currently at WCC,” he said. “I suspect they achieve a comparable level only in a few institutions.  The remarkable success of WCC's Latin program is due, I believe, to the use of pedagogical techniques that have been proven effective in modern language teaching over the last 50 years or so (in place of the traditional, grammar-and translation-bound approach), to the dynamism and dedication of the instructor, and to the abilities and enthusiasm of the students.”

Latin Weekends
The unusual, immersive program undertaken by the Wyoming Catholic College professors and students has had a number of interesting side-effects, as well. Over the summer, College faculty members Jeremy Holmes, Michael Bolin, and Scott Olson (as well as current Junior Lydia Mason) took part in two of Professor Llewellyn’s Rusticatio Virginiana weekends. Sponsored by the North American Institute for Living Latin Studies, the Rusticationes are “week-long, full-immersion Latin workshops offering high-energy conversation exercises and readings from Latin literature.” The majority of participants are Latin scholars who have been familiarizing themselves with the language for many years, but the WCC contingent was comfortable and completely at home. It was indeed a tribute to the “abilities and enthusiasm” mentioned by Dr. Morgan, as well as a resounding endorsement of the immersion method.

 

Shortly after participating in her first Rusticatio, Lydia had the opportunity to put her unusual linguistic education to good use, offering a week-long immersion course to local homeschoolers in and around her home town of Derwood, MD. The response was so overwhelmingly positive that she was asked to offer another week’s worth of courses to enthusiastic young participants. “I felt like Magistra,” she said. “It was wonderful. I really enjoy being able to pass on what I’ve learned; not a lot of folks have had the opportunity to experience Latin as a ‘real’ spoken language. But once they do, they love it! It’s amazing how speaking the language aloud changed my students’ view of Latin from thinking of it as a chore to recognizing it as a truly enjoyable experience.”

 

Who says Latin is a dead language? Wyoming Catholic College students would beg to differ; it is most definitely alive and well here in Lander, WY. (September 24, 2009)