Moldavians in Russian class

[George Fowler]

David Burrous writes (reasonably) about native speakers in Russian classes:

>My suggestion is for you to "kick them out".

...

>What's the point of studying Russian if you already speak Russian?

My wife Maria Pavlovszky, who teaches Russian at IUPUI (Indiana
University-Purdue University, Indianapolis--abominable name for a school!),
is faced with this problem all the time, and has yet to resolve it to her
satisfaction. Half of her students fall into this category; if she simply
kicked them out enrollments would be horrible. Moreover, in her case, these
are new immigrants from Ukraine and similar xUSSR countries. All of them
have some other language listed on their records as their official native
language (including Hebrew for those who passed through Israel), and they
insist that they have the "right" to take Russian. There's one other
practical consideration at IUPUI: many of these students have financial aid
which requires that they take 6 hours. 3 hours are naturally available in
an English course, so they need another 3 hours. Some of them don't really
know English well enough yet to take a normal course, so they sign up for
Russian. They claim (how true this is, I cannot judge) that without taking
Russian, they would lose their financial aid. It sounds fishy, yet she gets
this same story over and over.

George Fowler

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