Hendrickson explains the value of tiered readers in the SCS blog

Tom Hendrickson, senior editor at Pixelia, recently wrote an article for the blog of the Society for Classical Studies titled "Tiered Readers: A New Bridge between the Introductory Textbook and Unadapted Latin."

"The idea behind a tiered reader," he writes, "is to help students read unadapted Latin by presenting each sentence of an ancient work along with several simplified versions, or 'tiers.'"

According to Hendrickson, this relatively novel approach to the teaching of Latin has several clear advantages. Better comprehension of the text is one of the most important. A student can sometimes puzzle over a sentence of Cicero for half an hour and still be left with only a foggy idea of the meaning. Tiered readers offer the meaning in more accessible Latin in the lower tiers, so that by the time students reach the unadapted sentence, they already have a good idea of what to expect. What's more, they have acquired that understanding without the aid of an English translation. The experience of making sense of a difficult sentence while reading nothing but Latin builds students' confidence in their language skills and reduces the likelihood that they will seek out other aids -- two more advantages of the tiered approach.

Hendrickson writes that when he first heard of tiered readers, he worried that the simplified tiers would suck time and energy away from the original text. And yet he found the opposite to be the case. Students didn't just read more Latin in total as they worked through the tiers; they read more unadapted Latin. The lower tiers, in other words, more than made up for the time students invested in them by allowing them to read the original more efficiently and more naturally. As Hendrickson puts it,

"Simply put, tiered readers allow students to read more unadapted Latin prose, more quickly, and with greater comprehension than would be possible with traditional student editions."

See Hendrickson's full article HERE. See also Anna Pisarello's tiered reader of Cicero's Prō Archiā Poētā Ōrātiō, published by Pixelia.