What is the Nature Method?
By Dr. Nancy Llewellyn
Introductory Latin classes at the Veterum Sapientia Institute take students through Hans Ørberg’s famous textbook, Lingua Latīna per sē Illustrāta. First published in Denmark in the 1950’s, the book is based on instructional principles formulated around 1900 by British pedagogues who gave them the collective name “Direct Method.” Succeeding decades renamed it “Nature Method.” Sidelined in the 1970’s and ‘80’s, Nature Method began a vigorous renaissance in Italy in the 1990’s thanks in great part to the efforts of the great Italian Latinist Luigi Miraglia. It quickly re-established itself thereafter in the rest of Europe and in the USA. Today, Latin teachers using Nature Method principles with Ørberg’s book have risen to the forefront of their field and are widely recognized as leaders in Latin pedagogy.
The basis of Nature Method is the simple idea that foreign-language instruction in classrooms ought in essence to re-create the experience the student had as a baby and small child learning his own native tongue. The Method’s early proponents, notably the English schoolmaster W.H.D. Rouse, had rightly observed that all human beings in the first three to four years of life — regardless of geographical location, economics or culture — still go through, in essence, one and the same process of learning the native language. Because every baby is still years away from even the rudiments of written language, for him, all language is sound. The problem he faces is that he must deduce the meaning of the sounds adults make at him by direct (i.e. unmediated) experience of their connection with the people and things they represent (e.g. ”Mommy,” “nap time”), since he knows no other language that would make translation a helpful avenue for learning. This is every human being’s first great intellectual challenge, met — and surmounted — even before he has developed a “rational intellect” at all!
To their observations, the creators of the Nature Method added a hypothesis, which I express as follows: the universal process we all go through as young children is, in its general contours, the unique process by which every human being learns language, at any stage of life and any environment. Consequently, classroom instruction both of school-age pupils and adults ought to mimic the natural process, and will only be successful to the extent that it does so. A hundred years on, there is good evidence to suggest this claim is, at its core, correct, though it has been repeatedly subjected both to hostile challenge and to helpful clarification. Perhaps the most important clarification was put forward in the 1980’s by American linguist and educator Dr. Stephen Krashen. Krashen’s 1985 The Input Hypothesis persuasively argued that what is going on in the mind of every learner, in those golden moments when learning occurs, is that he is receiving Comprehensible Input in the Target Language. This formulation has come to be widely known among language teachers under the abbreviation CI.
Ørberg and the Nature Method
Ørberg, of course, writing in the 1950’s, had never heard of the Input Hypothesis, but even a quick inspection of Lingua Latina per se Illustrata makes it clear that Lingua Latina is ante litteram a Comprehensible Input-based textbook. It opens with heavy use of illustrations in the initial chapters to make its text comprehensible, and then continues with marginalia in which new words are defined – always in Latin – by recourse to old ones. I make a point of telling my college students on the first day of Latin 101 that they’ll be using a textbook written exclusively in Latin in order to learn Latin. They are frequently stupefied at first, but stupefaction soon gives way to delight as they discover they can follow me explaining a map in Latin using Chapter One’s vocabulary, and even read the chapter after their first day of class. As a student of mine many years ago at Wyoming Catholic College put it: “You’re using words I’ve never heard before, but I understand you!”
Why VSI Uses Lingua Latina per se Illustrata
We use Lingua Latina at VSI precisely because it does a better job than any other textbook we know of delivering Latin that students can understand as Latin, without recourse to translations or technical explanations, in accordance with the process of Nature. There is a time, certainly, when technical explanations are appropriate and beneficial, but to find that time we have to look at what happens in the normal course of things. Children, and people functioning at the linguistic level of children (i.e. beginning students), rightly start learning about grammar concepts only after they’re able to understand a simple explanation delivered in the language they’re trying to learn. Here too, Oerberg proves his consistency as a Nature Method teacher, since the Latin-language grammar section he adds to the end of each chapter is always example-driven rather than rule-driven. The student is guided toward observing for himself the patterns that drive meaning in the language. Internalizing those patterns as rules leads to their incorporation into permanent memory, which is the key to fluent reading of Latin texts of any century – the ultimate goal of our Institute’s Latin program.
Footnotes
- Krause, C.A. The Direct Method in Modern Languages. New York: Scribner, 1916. This work offers a look at the primordia of Direct Method, largely in the context of French and German instruction. An interesting account of its application to Latin as early as 1913 can be found in F.R. Dale’s article “Latin by the Direct Method” in Greece and Rome, vol. II no. 5 pp. 65-70. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1933. Notable also are S.O. Andrew’s 1913 Praeceptor: A Master’s Book, Chickering and Hoadley’s 1914 textbook Beginners’ Latin by the Direct Method, and Fr. William Most’s 1961 Latin by the Natural Method. This latter, however, differs sharply from Lingua Latīna in that Fr. Most makes abundant use of technical explanations in English.
Two examples of this current in Latin-teaching are the MA program in Classics at the University of Kentucky at Lexington and in Latin and Classical Humanities at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. Both programs produce highly-qualified secondary-school Latin teachers.
The great Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget, considered the founder of developmental psychology as a discipline, identified and described four stages of human intellectual development, from birth to adulthood. The first two stages, the Sensorimotor and Preoperational stage, are typically completed by age 7 (also the traditional and Biblical ‘age of reason’). According to Piaget, the seven-year-old human 1) has understood and absorbed the fact that external people and things have a reality equal to his own and independent from his own perception, and 2) has developed the ability to understand and use symbols (usually sound combinations, i.e. spoken words) to represent people and things external and internal. Beyond that, Logical (“Operational”) Thought and Scientific Reasoning, as defined by Piaget, are capacities which develop in the human being, respectively, between age 7 and 11, and after age 11 to adulthood. It is worth noting that the human being’s acquisition of his native language, as far as listening and speaking are concerned, happens before those latter two stages. Moreover, the barest rudiments of written language —namely, the letters of the alphabet — are not normally presented to a child until the first two developmental stages are near completion, around age six. These facts could reasonably call into question language-teaching methodologies which rely on logic and rational analysis of language and do not make heavy use of speaking Latin and listening to it in class.
Krashen, Stephen. The Input Hypothesis: Issues and Implications. White Plains NY: Longman, 1985. Krashen is the originator of the Natural Approach to language-teaching, which is distinct from the Nature Method (aka Direct Method) even though the two have many elements in common.
