“Scriptorium” is a nice term coined by Professor Alexander Arguelles, personally I just used to think of it as a writing exercise that I had been doing naturally. But now that it has a name that is becoming recognised in the language learning community it makes it all the more accessible.
First off, let me detail what scriptorium is… Basically, as I said, it’s a writing exercise.. but what kind of writing exercise I hear you say. Ok, here we go…
You find some sentences you want to practice for grammar, vocabulary or just for the sentence in general and you grab some paper; I like using an exercise book with about 25 lines per page… Now write 
Steps:
- Write the sentence slowly, sounding out the words as you go. By that I mean write the word and say it as you are writing, write the next word and say that as you are writing, and so on.
- When you finish the sentence, repeat the whole sentence aloud at a natural pace
- Move to the next line and start the process again.
- Repeat it again and again until you fill the page or until you feel comfortable (I typically do 2 longer sentences per page for about 10-15 repetitions each)
When you become more advanced in the language you are studying then you can move onto doing a paragraph or passage, in which case I would suggest still doing each sentence independently of one another but not the repetitions of each sentence. By this I mean something like:
- Write the sentence sounding out the words and repeat the sentence naturally when finished.
- Move on to next sentence in the passage with the same method.
- Keep on going until you complete the passage.
- Start from beginning of passage again if you feel like you need to.
The more advanced you are, the easier it becomes and the less you need to focus on repeating things to consolidate the concepts.
Some people may see this as rote learning, and in a way I guess it is. However, you’re ultimate aim should not be to memorise the sentence in my opinion, but more to understand the structure behind the sentence. This is something I see more as a form of focused input (see Input Hypotheses for more in input in general) where you are being exposed to natural language usage, but you are actively engaging yourself in the language. Focusing intently on the intricacies instead of the global notion.
Anyway, I hope you find this method useful in your language learning.. It is something that only takes 10-15 minutes to do but has so much benefit through my experience of studying language. In fact, I’d go as far as to say, that once you are familiar with the phonology of a language and confident in your listening skills, then scriptorium is perhaps one of the best value for money exercises out there.
