Teaching text types in Latin letters: a didactic use of linguistic concepts

Abstract

Students of Latin tend to focus on the word and sentence level. In this article, we propose to introduce concepts from text linguistic research to students. Knowledge of text types should help students of Latin at secondary schools in comprehending and translating Latin texts. We introduce four Discourse Modes, each with its own linguistic characteristics. These modes are applicable to texts of many genres, but in this article we focus on letters by Cicero and Pliny.