Nearly all students have tackled foreign languages such as Spanish, French, and Mandarin during their time at PHS, but AP English students are now faced with a new challenge in learning Middle English.

In English teacher Elise Marks’s senior AP English classes, pupils are beginning to be exposed to Middle English as a part of the unit on The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. This ancient language, commonly mistaken as the language used in works by William Shakespeare, was used in from roughly the 12th to 15th centuries.

In her 12th year teaching AP English at PHS, Marks teaches seniors about the origins of the language we speak today.

“Most people have no clue about the history of the English language, and don’t know how much it has changed over the millennium,” Marks said. “Part of the purpose of doing this is to make students more aware that English has a linguistic history.”

The Canterbury Tales unit includes lessons on the various pronunciations and structure of the language, as well as analysis of the stories in the collection. Students are required to memorize the first 12 lines of the book, and will recite the lines with the correct medieval pronunciations.

Marks, who learned Middle English as a part of her English major in college, believes that gaining an understanding of the original language is essential to attain the maximum learning experience possible from the book.

“Reading Chaucer when it’s translated into Modern English, is nowhere near as rich or interesting,” Marks said. “It’s a stretch for some students, but I think it’s a healthy stretch.”

Relating Middle English studies to historical events is also a main point of emphasis in these lessons. Another central concept is having students understand the evolution of language through the rise and fall of various empires throughout history, Marks said.

Marks’s students are excited about this uncommon assignment in an ever-increasingly monotonous classroom environment.

“This unit allows us to learn more about the history of English in a really unique way,” senior Connor Christiansen said. “It’s exciting to speak what is essentially a new language.”

A student in AP Spanish, Christiansen said that exposure to Spanish has helped him with memorizing different pronunciations and verb conjugations.

Senior Ellie Forrester is also enthusiastic about Middle English.

“It was awesome when Dr. Marks started speaking fluently in Middle English,” Forrester said. “The different pronunciations are complicated at first, but the more exposure to it, the more fun and exciting it is to speak another language.”

Although this unit is a challenge for some students, Marks said that the main goal of the lessons is to allow students to be exposed to both a new method of learning and new content that gives more perspective on current spoken English.