Teaching and Learning Greek in Byzantium II: Learning and Using Vocabulary in Byzantium and Beyond

Vocabulary is an indispensable ingredient for every form of communication. Teaching and learning receptive and productive vocabulary are therefore essential parts of the language learning process. Modern pedagogical and linguistic scholarship has devoted much attention to the subject. Nation (2001), for example, emphasizes that learning vocabulary is a cumulative process; vocabulary must be deliberately taught, learned, and recycled. He also stresses the mutual dependence between vocabulary knowledge and language use, as lexical knowledge enables language use and, conversely, language use leads to an increase in lexical knowledge.

The Byzantines – especially those who aimed to read and write high-register Medieval Greek – were no strangers to these dynamics and the pedagogical processes involved. Students were expected to acquire extensive lexical competence in all dialects of ancient Greek. Consequently, teachers and scholars produced a wide array of textbooks and teaching materials to assist students in expanding their vocabulary, often with ancient model texts as their point of departure. Although these materials have recently started to attract more attention, the actual pedagogical strategies and didactic practices of Byzantine teachers remain ill understood: What words did teachers select for their students to learn? What do their materials tell us about their conceptions of dialect and register? What can scholia and glosses, epimerisms, metaphrases, and lexica reveal about pedagogical strategies and didactic practice? How did teachers facilitate student learning in the classroom? 

By addressing these and similar questions, this workshop delves into the practice of Byzantine vocabulary instruction by studying the materials teachers prepared to facilitate teaching and learning. Its primary focus is on the how of teaching young students Greek words through ancient model texts: it explores the different – overlapping? – didactic approaches underlying various types of teaching materials; it addresses the materiality of these textbooks and examines what the manuscripts can tell us about their practical use in a teaching context; and it studies personal preferences and individual emphases in the works of different teachers. By concentrating on vocabulary instruction, the workshop intervenes in debates over Byzantine classicism and sheds light on Byzantine attitudes to the ancient literary heritage in the classroom and beyond. At the same time, it opens a window onto the ways in which education prepared students to understand the literature of their time and produce writings of their own.