Latin students’ bottom-up and top-down strategies for reading Latin literature and the impact of cross-linguistic influence

In an attempt to apply modern foreign language research and theory to the instruction of classical languages, this article describes the qualitative phase of a research study (Boyd, R. M. 2016.High school students’ comprehension strategies for reading Latin literature. Washington, D.C.: George Washington University doctoral dissertation.) on Latin reading comprehension strategies. First, there is a discussion of the linguistic factors that affect native English language readers of Latin, including cross-linguistic influence and negative syntactic transfer. Second, there is a review of the relevant literature on second language reading comprehension strategies, derived from empirically-tested reading strategies reported in modern second language research journals and described anecdotally in classics journals. Finally, there is a thorough description of the semi-structured interview that was conducted with twelve high school students to gather the Latin reading strategies they used during an authentic classroom reading comprehension assessment. Results showed that Latin students overall demonstrated a preference for bottom-up strategies when reading Latin, with limited transfer of top-down strategies due to insufficient Latin language proficiency. Students imposed English language patterns onto Latin texts, and negative English syntactic transfer hindered Latin reading comprehension.