Textbook

Under Development

Seo Weorold Leornunge: A Living Language Approach to Old English is a suite of Old English teaching materials that apply the communicative principles of second language acquisition and the pedagogical ethics of diversity, equity, and inclusivity to Old English instruction Seo Weorold Leornunge consists of 1) a student textbook; 2) a digital coursepack that is built to plug into existing classroom management software; 3) an instructor guide; and 4) a collection of pedagogical essays that address teaching Old English in our present moment.  

Seo Weorold Leornunge treats Old English as a natural human language rather than as a linguistic corpus meant to be decoded. Therefore, it takes a “living language” approach to learning Old English, providing appropriately scaffolded lessons that allow students to learn Old English grammar and vocabulary by speaking, listening, reading, writing, viewing, and creating in both Old and Modern English. As the lessons unfold, Old English grammar and vocabulary are introduced progressively through a five unit story arc that follows a merchant named Sæwulf on his mercantile travels from Jerusalem to the port cities of north Africa, then across the rivers and roads of Francia, until he finally reaches the emporium of Ipswich in East Anglia. Along the way, he meets a monk named Hadrian, a pilgrim named Eugenia,and a Welsh plowman named Bugga, and, an abbess named Aethelthryth, among others. While many of these figures are historical, complete narratives of their lives do not exist in the Old English corpus, and Seo Weorold Leornunge takes advantage of these gaps in order to construct its own Old English text, and adapt existing ones, to tell their stories, gradually introducing texts from the Old English corpus to students, across the span of the textbook. In so doing, Seo Weorold Leornunge presents teachers and students with a world in which issues of religion, race, and ethnicity; sex and power; gender fluidity; and class and slavery are folded into the fabric of Sæwulf’s journey, which traces the complexities, mis-matches, and potential alignments and differences between identity politics of the early medieval world and those of the world we currently live in. Seo Weorold Leornunge presents an Old English learning environment that is welcoming, engaging, inclusive, and historically and culturally accurate.