Introduction
Over the course of the 2023/24 academic year, I conducted research into Latin composition in two Year 7 classes. Inspired by my own work with Latin composition in publishing Latin novellasFootnote 1 , I wanted to see if there would be any benefits to introducing composition into beginner Latin lessons.
The most common kind of composition in Latin classrooms is prose composition – the direct translation of English into Latin. Prose composition is entirely optional at both GCSE and A Level study, and contributes only 5% and 17% of marks, respectively, and the alternative to prose composition is not free composition but grammatical questions. Furthermore, free composition – the writing of Latin without direct translation from English – is rather rare in UK Latin classrooms. It is more commonly done on the other side of the Atlantic, in classrooms in the USA (Hunt, Reference Hunt2023). I decided to explore the introduction of free and prose composition into my Year 7 Latin lessons, to observe any benefits to me and my students, and to find the best way to implement these skills going forwards, if at all.
Teaching sequence
I teach in an all-girls non-academically selective independent school in Hertfordshire. At the time of this research, Latin is compulsory for all students in Year 7Footnote 2 , and each year we have five classes of around 20 students. The classes contain a range of abilities and Special Educational Needs. Each class gets one lesson of Latin per week, an hour and fifteen minutes in length, and we follow the Cambridge Latin Course (CSCP, 1998), reaching Stage 8 by the end of the year. In Year 7, the students choose which languages they wish to continue, or pick up, in Year 8Footnote 3 . Students choose their GCSEFootnote 4 options in Year 9.
In the 2023/24 academic year, I taught three of the five Year 7 classes. I chose to conduct my research with this year group for several reasons. Firstly, I find Year 7 students to be more enthusiastic and positive than other year groups, and so they might be more receptive to something new. Additionally, very few of the Year 7 students have done Latin before, and so there are no preconceptions about how Latin might be taught and how difficult it might be. When my GCSE students are first introduced to prose composition, they recoil in fear. They say, ‘It’s too hard’, ‘I can’t do it’, ‘What is the point’. They have a learned fear of translating into Latin, whether that stems from a fear of the unknown or a fear of failure. Year 7 pupils should have no such fear, knowing no different (Holke, Reference Holke2019). My final reason (admittedly) is that, teaching the same three lessons each week, I was seeking some variety in my teaching, and having three classes provided me with a good opportunity to try multiple methods of teaching.
With my three classes, I chose to teach one class as I normally would, with neither free composition nor prose composition included in the lessons. Of the other two classes, one would have free composition activities and the other prose composition activities. Aside from this, there was to be no difference in lesson content or my teaching style. For the prose composition class, once per term I selected a short story from the Cambridge Latin Course (CLC), translated into English for the students to translate back into Latin. These stories were ‘in triclinio’ from Stage 2 (CSCP, 1998), ‘in horto’ from Stage 3 (CSCP, 2022) and ‘Felix’ from Stage 6 (CSCP, 1998). For the free composition class, at the same points in the year, I set a writing prompt based on the above stories: for ‘in triclinio’, to write a continuation of the prior story ‘mercator’; for ‘in horto’, to write a story taking place in a garden; for ‘Felix’, to write a story about meeting a friend.
Of course, the Cambridge Latin Course and its stories were not designed with prose composition in mind. However, I chose to adapt the stories as a way of integrating the free and prose composition more naturally into my scheme of work. Additionally, exercises made for beginning prose composition are usually individual, unconnected sentences which convey little meaning, while narratives and stories are more compelling for students and provide more than just grammatical benefits (Gruber-Miller, Reference Gruber-Miller2006). I acknowledge that that this method is imperfect, and necessary adaptations and improvements are detailed below.
My primary sources of data are my observations of my students and my evaluations of the lessons, as well as marking and reviewing the work that the students produced.
Prose composition
I will start with my observations of my prose composition class, for this is the activity with which most Latin teachers will be familiar. My observations will focus on the students’ common mistakes, their changing attitudes and how the activity needs to be implemented in the future. The three compositions from three students (A–C), displaying a range of ability and progression through the year, can be found in the Appendix.
Reviewing the work created by the students after each lesson revealed both expected and unexpected mistakes. While the class could identify an accusative in Latin, tell me what the accusative case does and translate it into English, very few of them remembered to add ‘-m’ onto the end of the noun when writing in Latin. Accusatives improved as the year progressed, but suffered when the preposition ‘ad’ entered the stories, even when told how the preposition worked. Additionally, despite never seeing the combination in any of the Latin that they had been exposed to, more than half of the students combined the present tense main verb with esse, for example ‘est dormit’ or ‘est sedet’. It was not all verbs that were translated this way, only those that were written in English as ‘is -ing’, and the imperfect tense was never translated with ‘erat’. There were very few fully completed translations, and no perfect translations, out of all three compositions. Many students either missed out sentences they could not do, or simply wrote in English.
Though these errors were frustrating to read, especially after a year of repeating case endings and tenses, they were not without silver linings. Denise Batchelor’s Year 9 students also combined esse with main verbs in their first forays into prose composition, and I must agree with her that prose composition is a useful diagnostic tool (Batchelor, Reference Batchelor2018). Doing these translations revealed a serious misconception in the grammar, one I was unaware that they had, and that I was then able to address in subsequent lessons, a definite benefit to doing prose composition.
My second set of observations focusses on student attitudes towards the activity. As mentioned above, I gave no indication that this was anything particularly special. The class engaged with it with their usual positive attitudes and enthusiasm. Every student made an attempt to complete the translation. However, by the last term of the year, the third prose composition activity was met with groans and defeated looks. In comparison with other activities, this one caused the most struggle and the most mistakes, and therefore became an activity they disliked. At this point in time, I cannot say whether their attitudes would have remained positive had the improvements, which are listed below, been implemented sooner. That remains for future attempts to find out.
The final focus of my observations was on how to improve the prose composition activity. After three cycles of implementing, reviewing and revising, the two areas that are key to making the activity work are the length of the text and the amount of vocabulary given. First, the length of the text causes a common problem that teachers have in mixed-ability classrooms. The stories that I used were 14 lines (‘in triclinio’, 86 words), 11 lines (‘in horto’, 80 words) and 12 lines long (‘Felix’, 90 words). If it is too short, higher-ability students will race through it and need extensions, too long and the lower-ability students will not finish. Though the stories in the Cambridge Latin Course are ones that this Year 7 class, even those of lower ability, could translate into English in 20–30 minutes, translating in the other direction was a struggle in an hour. I will certainly be adapting the stories more for future attempts at prose composition, focussing on condensing the story into more manageable lengths and ensuring sufficient vocabulary support.
The second key area is vocabulary support, which I vastly underestimated to begin with. No matter how many vocabulary tests, Quizlets and Blookets they worked on, the students did not know as much vocabulary as I thought they did, and this lack of knowledge is almost impossible to overcome in prose composition without English to Latin dictionaries – which the Cambridge Latin Course does not have, not being a prose composition textbook, and nor does my department. For my students to feel like they were making progress and succeeding, the amount of vocabulary support, in the form of separate vocabulary lists, had to be increased significantly.
Throughout the year, I overcame my misconceptions about prose composition and the support that would be needed for it so that future attempts would be improved.
To summarise, my experiment with prose composition in a Year 7 class, while it was a useful resource for grammatical misconceptions, needed significant revision of length and vocabulary support for my students to succeed, and they grew to dislike it when they were not successful.
Free composition
My observations of my free composition class will focus on the same three aspects: the students’ mistakes, their attitudes and the improvements needed to make this activity work better in the future. As before, three compositions from three students (D–F), displaying a range of ability and progression through the year, can be found in the Appendix.
First, reviewing the work created by this class brought similar observations as the prose composition class. If the students wanted to write that someone ‘is -ing’, they would combine the main verb with esse. Accusative endings were also missed, and the English word ‘the’ made several appearances. These errors improved across the three lessons. Other errors which were present in the prose composition class, such as the preposition ‘ad’ and using other tenses, did not appear in the free composition work, most likely because the students only used what they were comfortable with and therefore kept their stories in the present tense, which led to greater levels of accuracy. When it comes to mistakes, whether or not you think it better for your students to stay in their grammatical comfort zones with free composition, it still offers the same diagnostic opportunities as prose composition. I was able to address the same errors with this class as a result of what their free composition work revealed to me.
It is with the second observation focus that the two forms of composition differ the most. The enthusiasm and excitement that greeted free composition was incredible. I had never seen a class get so excited about writing. Even the quietest, most reticent students in the room had an idea and wrote something unique. Their enthusiasm manifested in great ambition, with many asking me how to say X, Y and Z. Many of the things they wanted to say required grammar that was too advanced for them, so I encouraged them to use what they already knew to write it, though I did provide any vocabulary they needed. It did frustrate them when they could not say exactly what they wanted, but not enough to impact their work. Though their stories were significantly shorter than their prose composition counterparts, partly owing to the limitations of their vocabulary and grammar, they were far more interesting to read.
Trusted, in his work with Year 7 creative composition, found, like myself, that the imaginations of 11- to 12-year-old girls are surprisingly graphic and violent (Trusted, Reference Trusted2024). In some of the stories written by my class, Caecilius throws Grumio out of a window, Grumio poisons his master, Cerberus attacks and kills a bird, and a duck stalks Caecilius. As interesting as the stories were for me to read, it was also an interesting activity for the class, as I overheard one student saying as she left the classroom: ‘That was a fun lesson’. And this enthusiasm did not wane through the year, and all three activities were met with the same level of excitement. While enjoyment is not a prerequisite for learning, nor always an indicator of it, I find it to be a useful component of engagement, which itself can lead to learning.
Finally, from my experience doing free composition for three lessons, there is one main area of improvement that I will focus on: vocabulary. I think it is the freedom that makes this activity so exciting for students, and freedom of writing requires more vocabulary than most Year 7 students have. But an alternative must be found than putting 20 students’ demands for words upon the shoulders of one teacher. If your school has English–Latin dictionaries, then these should be used to allow students freedom of vocabulary, though monitoring the level of grammar should continue. Without proper English–Latin dictionaries, some way of providing the students with plenty of interesting vocabulary should be found. If you can anticipate your students’ imaginations and offer them a resource that they can use without feeling stifled, then the onus for vocabulary will not fall solely on the teacher. An alternative may be for students to work collaboratively on stories, in pairs or small groups.
When it comes to free composition, I highly recommend it. Not only did it provide me with a similar diagnostic tool as prose composition, but my students continued to enjoy each attempt at it. My vocabulary provision needs to improve, but it is certainly an activity that I will be doing again.
Conclusion
Over the course of one academic year, I experimented with free and prose composition with two of my three Year 7 classes. These experiments took place at the same times of the year, with classes of similarly mixed ability and Special Educational Needs. The setting of my research is not universally applicable, being an all-girls private school, and three sessions is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to looking deeper into this topic. Results may vary in state and co-ed schools. I still found this experience enlightening and very positive.
I have concluded that there is much that both free and prose composition can bring to the Latin classroom, but there is something unique that only free composition has.
Both forms of composition required students to write in Latin, something they had never done before. All students approached the activities without fear, at first. Through both forms of composition, misunderstandings and grammatical errors were exposed that would otherwise have been missed, which makes these activities invaluable. Additionally, by continuing to complete composition, I could track the progress over the year and see that the frequency of each type of error lessened. Both free and prose composition are useful diagnostic tools for Latin teachers.
However, there is something that only free composition can provide, and that is continual engagement. There were more discussions among the students and more engagement when creating their own stories. It was also incredibly entertaining and fascinating to read the stories they wrote, and get to know my class all the better (I must admit, stalker ducks are far more exciting than sitting in a garden).
Both free and prose composition have their benefits, and I readily admit that my teaching of them required improvement from attempt to attempt. But the added interest that free composition has is what will prompt me to include more of it in my Latin lessons. Free composition will help me to identify errors in understanding, be adaptive to the needs and levels of my students and produce exciting and interesting stories.
Supplementary material
The supplementary material for this article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1017/S2058631025100640
Competing interests
The author(s) declare none.
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