First-year Russian language textbook "Golosa"

[Joanna and Richard Robin]

As one of the three co-authors of Golosa, I can tell you how
we use the book at the George Washington University.

We are on a semester system and teach courses that run both
four and eight hours a week with 14 weeks per semester. We
go through a unit of Golosa doing *nearly* everything in a
chapter in 10 class hours. That comes out to one chapter in
two weeks and two days in the non-intensive course, and a
chapter per week (plus a day) in the intensive course. When
we find ourselves falling behind schedule, we ditch some of
the obzornye uprazhenija. In other words, we do one volume a
year in non-intensive and 1 volume a semester in intensive.

Other luxuries to cut include the Listening Conversations
(Razgovory) of O chemn idet rech' at the beginning of every
unit, some of the stuff in Fonetika I intonacija from the
Workbook, and some of the Ustnye uphrazhnenija.

If you were to cut out nearly all of the proficiency
luxuries (the initial listening conversations, the more
complicated listening texts of Davajte poslushaem, and some
of the Davajte poschitaem texts), you could probably do a
unit in seven hours. That would make Book 1 fit into an
academic year based on three hours a week.

If you want to look at a suggested lesson plan
for a chapter at our Slavic Department's World Wide Web site.
The URL is

http://gwis.circ.gwu.edu/~slavic/golosa.html

-Regards, Rich Robin

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Richard Robin     <robin at gwuvm.gwu.edu>
Slavic Languages and Literatures, The George Washington University
Washington, DC 20008