6380 MCT eMagazine Submission

Chelsea Roidt

Biography​: Chelsea Roidt is going into her 10th year as a Latin teacher at Lancaster High School,
where she strives to bring a dead language back to life on a daily basis. She graduated from BGSU
with a degree in Foreign Language Education in 2009 and is now back pursuing her Masters in
Classroom Technology. Trying to finish a Masters degree with a newborn is not something that she
would recommend, but her three-year-old (and her husband) “help” as much as they can and she is
looking forward to diving into the new school year with all of the new tools and strategies that she has
accumulated in the MCT program.

Reviving a Dead Language ​via​ Technology

By: Chelsea Roidt

When people hear that I teach Latin, most of them have the same reaction: Isn’t that a dead
language? This inexplicably launches me into a flurry of reasoning as to how the language is still alive
and Romance languages and English derivatives and how I even used it in the title of this article. It is
from this constant and repetitive scene that the idea for my action research arose. I wanted to actually
prove that an emphasis on technology-based vocabulary retention strategies in a world language
classroom could have a positive effect on the amount of English derivatives that a student learned.
Along with saving me some explaining, proving a statistical correlation between those two variables
would open the doors to a department meeting about how important this relationship is to students
looking to take the ACT or SAT in high school and even the GRE in the future and what our role as a
world language department should be in that pursuit of English vocabulary.
I started my study by asking teachers in my department what types of technology-based
strategies they used most commonly in the classroom and found that Quizlet and Google apps had the
most utilization when it came to teaching vocabulary, with Kahoot, DuoLingo, and Quizizz close behind.
Because I want to expand this study to the entire department eventually, I stuck to the strategies that
teachers were most used to in order to make the procedure easier for everyone down the road.
Predominantly using those two platforms, I included no less than 75 minutes of technology-based
vocabulary retention strategies in my Latin 3 classroom each week with an additional emphasis on
corresponding English derivatives as well as the target language vocabulary of the unit. Students
responded well within the lessons to the built-in activities of Quizlet and enjoyed the creativity that was
incorporated with the projects assigned within Google apps such as Docs and Slides.
In comparing the results of the pre and post tests, I found that students performed significantly
better after the emphasis on the technology-based strategies with an average increase of 47%. I plan to
share these results with my department and to move towards performing this study in the level 3
French and Spanish classrooms to compare the results. It is my hope that with a more intentional
approach to teaching vocabulary, we can improve and build our learners’ English vocabulary which will,
in turn, help them perform better in the areas of reading, writing, and comprehension. It is also my hope
that, with the help of technology and intentional cross-curricular teaching, word will spread that Latin is
not a dead language because of its relationship to and roots in so many other “living” languages.

Latin Root definition English derivatives

spectare to watch spectacle, spectator, inspect

ambulare to walk amble, ambulance, ambulatory

mater, matris mother maternal, maternity

lex, legis law legislative, legislature, legal