Be sure to check out Tim Decker’s new post. He is teaching Greek as a living language in a high school at Academia Los Pinares in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. A couple of things to note:

• Tim is co-teaching the course. Living language teaching works much better when you have a partner teaching alongside of you. It takes a lot of the pressure off you, and gives you someone to interact with so the students can watch and learn without the (initially) paralyzing prospect of producing a language they don’t know in front of their peers. It’s also much easier to display second and third person verbs this way, as well as imperatives, etc.
• The students at Tim’s school are all bilingual (Spanish/English). This is a major plus, because the students know what it actually means to know a second language. The likelihood is that they don’t know all grammatical terminology for Spanish and English verbs, but they speak and read it fairly fluently. What is incomprehensible to Greek teachers–that someone could be fluent in a language without having any formal understanding of its linguistic structure–is a daily reality for bilingual students!

Be sure to stay tuned for more reports from Tim.