Skidmore College Department of Classics

100-LEVEL GREEK AND LATIN LANGUAGE COURSES
Students will demonstrate the following skills:

• ability to read short passages of connected prose
  
• acquisition of basic grammatical, syntactical, morphological and vocabulary skills
  
• ability to identify the forms of words (“parse”) in a sentence and the function (“syntax”) of each word in that sentence
  
• basic understanding of cultural context of the language, examining/reading selected aspects of Greek or Roman civilization

200-LEVEL GREEK AND LATIN LANGUAGE/LITERATURE COURSES 
Building upon the skills acquired in 100-level courses, students will demonstrate the following skills:

• ability to read continuous prose and poetry, employing skills developed in 100-level language courses
  
• ability to effect the transition from grammar-based learning to reading comprehension
  
• ability to contextualize works of literature in their larger cultural settings, including:
       biographical details about the author
       corpus of works of the author
       literary world of the author
       political/social aspects of the setting of the text
  
• use of digital technology (web-based resources such as the textual, lexical and morphological tools in Perseus, grammars by Smyth and Allen & Greenough on-line, and cultural databases on Greece and Rome)

300-LEVEL GREEK AND LATIN LITERATURE COURSES
Building upon the skills acquired in 200-level courses, students will demonstrate the following skills:

• ability to read and analyze a text in depth
  
• ability to use a scholarly commentary and understand the discourse of a critical apparatus to a text
  
• ability to conduct a more sophisticated analysis of the cultural content and context of a literary work than at the 200-level
  
• ability to read and analyze scholarship critically
  
• ability to conduct a work of original independent research, for which the student selects his/her own topic and draws upon the body of primary and secondary materials (the latter including both journal articles and books), analyzes this scholarship and produces both a major writing project of textual analysis or a textual commentary oral reports as an outgrowth of this research
  
• ability to assess and present scholarship of a more theoretical nature, and apply theoretical constructs to the primary source