Ways of reading: evaluating different approaches to reading Latin stories with a Year 9 class in a selective boys' school

Abstract Before I started teacher training, my default approach to a story in a Latin textbook was to translate it into English. I assumed that this was how you best understood what was happening in the story, and how you showed that you understood. Although I had done other things as a learner myself, including comprehension exercises, my prevailing memory was of translation. Translation is a highly valued and prioritised skill, as seen in the weight given to it in examinations and assessments – though in my school placements I regularly see ‘translations’ that are near-incomprehensible ‘translationese’ rather than fluent English. This means that often after translating a sentence or passage – a very time-consuming activity – you can ask a student, ‘So, what does that mean? What's going on here?’ and that student will struggle to explain. I therefore wanted to investigate other ways to approach Latin stories. I will not claim that we were reading Latin in the truest sense of reading (left to right, at normal speed, comprehending the Latin in Latin and not needing recourse to English), but the three approaches we explored did engage with the texts without requiring literal English translation.