Moldavians in Russian class

[Harold D. Baker]

>Does anyone else beside me have an enormous influx of emigres from
>Moldavia in their classes? I have about half a dozen, all native
>speakers of Russian, of course. We can't accommodate them in a
>separate class, I don't want to kick them out, and yet it must
>be discouraging to the other students in the class to have them
>there. Emily Tall

I also have been running about 50% native speakers in my combined third-
and fourth-year Russian class (it's a very small class, with 7 students
overall, 4 of them native at the moment). My first reaction to this
situation was to move the curriculum in the direction of almost exclusively
communicative activities in which, supposedly, the natives would serve as
"resources" to the rest, promoting an intense level of student-motivated
hands-on learning. At the end of one quarter my non-native students were up
in arms, complaining heatedly that they didn't understand what was being
said in class, that they had no idea what was expected of them for a good
grade, and that the structure of the course could work only with
non-academic knowledge of the language. So I took Lenin's advice about one
step back. Now we have a comparatively structured curriculum, with quick
quizzes most days, recitation of homework assignments, vocab lists, and so
forth. On this basis I am attempting to continue the most successful
aspects of the "loose" curriculum, that is, Internet sessions once per
unit, video exercises at the same interval, plus literature and
independently-researched "culture bites," one student presentation per day.
To my surprise it turns out that this is much more challenging for the
natives! They don't understand Russian grammar and have narrow vocabularies
(some of them), and although they are perfectly fluent in ordinary
situations, they lack adult literacy, the awareness of language of educated
adults. This is a lot more work for me but I feel good about the change.

Harold D. "Biff" Baker
Program in Russian, HH156
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, CA 92717-5025 USA
hdbaker at uci.edu
1-714-824-6183/Fax 1-714-824-2379