by Julian Morgan, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Latin Vocab Drill software is perhaps the most used program for supporting the teaching of Classics in the world, used in about 3000 schools. It comes in many different versions, adapted to the needs of specific courses. It is also available in the UK in versions for public examination. There are many ways of using this examination based software successfully, but after development of a scheme of work at Derby Grammar School, the following method has seemed particularly successful.

The school has to buy a site licence from J-PROGS (http://www.j-progs.com) before commencing on the scheme and then makes the software available to the students, so each one will buy their own student licence. At the start of their GCSE year, when the pupils are 15 years old, student licences are bought by the students, at a cost of £10 (about 14 Euros) each. All pupils are then taken to the computer room and shown by the teacher how to use the program properly, as their homework for the next eight weeks will all be based on computer work done at home. It is therefore important that they work in the right ways.

First, they choose options within the program which allow them to work on separate lists of words one at a time, each list having about 10 words in it. They are instructed to look at the lists and work from Latin to English, with all parts of the word listed on screen. So they may see peto petere petivi petitum on screen, and type in their answer "seek". When they can complete a whole list, they move on the the second one, and so on. For a two week period they will work on nine lists, and when they become reasonably competent they are encouraged to select all nine lists together and test themselves on the whole block of lists, amounting to about 90 words.

After this, they test themselves again, but this time from English to Latin, with all parts listed. This means they will see "I seek" and will then need to type peto petere petivi petitum to get the answer right. As teachers, we need them to recognise and know all parts of verbs, or nouns in the nominative, genitive and gender, so this exercise is of benefit to all, whether or not they have ever done, or will ever do English into Latin as a skill.

At the end of the two week period, they come to class and are tested on 20 words by a teacher using LVD as a means of generating random words from the lists studied. The teacher sets the software to produce a drill of Latin to English, with only the first part listed, so the only thing the students see or hear is "peto". They then have to write out - by hand, not on the computer - peto petere petivi petitum - I seek, to get one mark. If anything is missing, they get no marks at all.

The success of the experiment, which was first conducted as research and is now part of our standard scheme of work, is that on average in Autumn 2003, the class of 9 boys gained 18.4/20 in their tests, in four tests taken over eight weeks. This is not only more efficient than earlier vocabulary learning undertaken in this department, but it also produces better results.

Further Information

A demo version of Latin Vocab Drill can be downloaded from the Centaur Systems website, http://www.centaursystems.com.