Learning to Teach the Biblical Languages: An Interview with Dr. Jennifer Noonan (Part 2 of 2) 

Great interview! Thanks for having Dr. Noonan.

Great interview! On the point of the grammar-translation method proving to be overwhelming for most learners, I have found some success by explaining to people that if we were to know someone who really loved English literature, the first thing we would definitely NOT tell them to do is to become a historical linguist of the English language. There are some people who not only love literature but who also have an interest in linguistics, and a heavy emphasis on grammar and linguistics will be really interesting and rewarding for that kind of learner, but for most people who are interested in reading literature, because they love literature, putting them in a very grammar and linguistics heavy environment may just crush their love of the subject. By focusing instead on implicit language knowledge and giving them just enough explicit knowledge as they need it to read the text in front of them, they are much more likely to stay with it. Put a slightly different way, if the primary ingredients that are necessary for high quality input are its richness, comprehensibility, and that it is compelling, the teacher can control the first two of those variables, but not the third. Someone who is teaching a language like Hebrew probably finds the small details about grammar to be personally very compelling for them, but we can't make that assumption about our students or even make it compulsory because it just won't stick with them. We just don't like this because we feel less in control of teaching if we can't easily measure morphological knowledge by having students regurgitate paradigms for us, but in the end it all comes down to timing the delivery of explicit knowledge so that it becomes compelling for the student at precisely the moment that it becomes necessary for them to solve the problems in the text before them.