Ellis Clarence Douglas, Schachter Albert, Griffith J.G. Ancient Greek: A Structural Programme. Volume 2

McGill-Queen's University Press, 1973. — p. 704-1440. — ISBN 0773501967.The McGill Greek Project was set up under a grant from the Ford Foundation, to produce elementary teaching materials in Ancient Greek. The Project is directed jointly by Professor C. D. Ellis, Department of Linguistics, and A. Schachter.
The immediate aim of the course is to teach all the important forms and syntax of the language, and which would prepare the student - usually at the university level - so thoroughly that he would be able to proceed in his reading and subsequent work with ease.
Concerning the actual language which the course was to teach, we needed a form of Greek in which there was a large amount of original material available, so that students, on completion of the course, would then be able to exercise their skills on a satisfactorily large corpus. We also needed a form of Greek which would provide a solid jumping off point from which to proceed to the acquisition of skill in otber dialects. Almost any dialect would bave fulfilled the second requirement, but only one dialect fulfils the first, namely Attic as written in the 4th century BC.
Concerning the corpus. We decided that all the reading matter should be taken from the original source, insofar as this was consistent with the student's level of progress. We chose as the corpus one work of each of two Athenian authors of the period, namely Plato and Xenophon. The actual works which were to form the corpus had to be in dialogue form, largely because we wanted to be able to present the student with real Greek which incorporated the whole range of verb and subject forms. This is less easy to come by in straight narrative. Our choice fell on the Euthyphro of Plato - which we use in its entirety - and the Symposium of Xenophon - of which we use about a third. The reason for choosing two authors instead of only one was simply that we felt it would be a good idea to present the student with two differing styles of writing in the same dialect.
Our next task was to decide what things had to be taught and the order in which they would be taught. This involved an analysis of the dialect, on the one hand, and of the corpus on the other. We did focus on features of relevance, both morphological and syntactic, at the initial teaching level, with particular attention to the verb system; and Professor Ellis analyzed the phonology for the express purpose of developing contrastive drills. We have also relied heavily on tried and tested grammatical compendia. A careful analysis of the corpus indicated that if we concentrated in the first half of the course on the progressive stem of the verb and on all the nominal and adjectival forms, the student, by the mid-way point, would be capable of reading over half the corpus. Frequency counts enabled us to work out the actual teaching sequence.We chose to compose the text in 30 units, each of which could be sub-divided into a varying number of class periods, depending on the nature of the school and the relative maturity of the students. The number thirty was worked out on the basis of one week per unit, assuming that the average college year contains thirty weeks. At the university level, it should be possible to get through a whole unit in three class periods of 45-50 minutes each, plus labs.