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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
National
Sally Weale

Teachers encouraged to use Taylor Swift lyrics to make Latin accessible

Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift music, Disney songs and Minecraft could be used to make Latin more accessible to pupils, says Steven Hunt. Photograph: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images

Latin teachers are being encouraged to use Taylor Swift’s lyrics, Disney songs, Minecraft and fan fiction to help make the ancient language of Virgil and Cicero more accessible to their 21st-century students.

In recent decades, schoolchildren – mainly in private schools – have mastered the early stages of Latin through the tales of Lucius Caecilius, a Pompeii banker who lived in the first century AD, and his family, as described in the popular Cambridge Latin Course, soon to be published in its fifth edition.

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