{campus life}
Greek Alive!
An Interview with Christophe Rico interview by El'ad Nichols-Kaufman '25
Christophe Rico is the Dean of Polis, the Jerusalem Institute of Languages and Humanity, and a professor of Greek Philology at the École Biblique et Archéologique Française de Jérusalem. He has pioneered the Polis method, which involves studying living and ancient languages in a full immersion environment. Nichols-Kaufman: Just to start off with, could you explain a little bit about what the Polis method is? Rico: First, full immersion. This is not something which is exclusive to Polis. Secondly, we have another main principle: we try to teach the language according to an algorithm that is natural to that very language. When I wrote the method of Greek, one of the most difficult things for me was to find the proper order of elements to be taught so that the process of acquisition of the language would be as smooth as possible. Something that helps a lot is to see what happens with children when they learn their mother tongue. Of course, we don't have any studies on children learning ancient Greek in antiquity, but we do have very interesting studies on modern Greek children learning their mother tongue. Even though modern Greek is quite different from ancient Greek, you still have many elements that are common in the structure of both languages. For instance, in both ancient modern Greek, there are two categories of imperative, the present tense imperative and the aorist imperative. It's very interesting to see that modern Greek children learn the aorist imperative first, and only afterwards they assimilate the present tense imperative. We take into account the results of this research on children's language acquisition in our own way
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of setting these steps. There are some steps that are very important in any language. You start with greetings because this is the first thing you need in order to communicate. When you start a conversation, you start with greetings. “Hello, how are you?” “thank you,” “bye bye,” these kinds of things. Then you have the second step, and it's the most common imperative: “get up,” “sit down,” “run,” “give me that,” “show me this,”. Next you have the deictics: “this is that,” “this is this,” “what is this?” “What is that?” That has to come at the very beginning, then we can move on to other elements of the language. If this natural order is followed, the acquisition process goes very quickly. Once we have talked about the principles, we have the techniques. One of them is TPR, total physical response. You ask someone to do something, she or he does it and then she or he gives the same command to somebody else, and you learn through commands and things that you do or that you are asked to do. Then you have the storytelling, telling stories and asking questions in a way that is understandable by those who are listening to you. Then you have another technique which is called story building, where you have a story which is told through images. For each image you ask the students to say what they are seeing. Then you have other
the Gadfly / λόγος / May 13, 2022
techniques, like working in small groups to talk, because you have the input followed by the output. If there is no output, you are not going to learn a language. There are many techniques like this to reinforce what has been learned through reading easy texts within the language. In the case of ancient Greek, if we look at ancient literature we have very few easy texts for beginners. So you have to make them up. One of the things we have done recently is to publish a translation of Hansel and Gretel into ancient Greek that was prepared for those who had finished only the first book, which means after 120 hours of instruction you can already read. Each time you have a new word that the student doesn't know, you have in the margins an explanation of the word which is given in ancient Greek with the words they already know, or else you have an illustration that helps understand what happened and what the word is about. Then there is a technique which is specific to the Polis method called living sequential expression. It is based on an idea of François Goiun, who lived at the end of the 19th century. His idea is that the first logical connection that a child will make in their head is sequentiality. In some activities, there is something that you do first and something that you do afterwards. So he tried to teach French with the same
