Moldavians in Russian class

[Emil Draitser]

The problem of native speakers in beginning Russian classes is
nation-wide, it seems. At Hunter College in New York we face it as well.
However, George's question "why to study Russian if you already speak
it?" may be answered -- to learn how to write and read. In my first year
Russian class I have three students from x USSR who speak fluently, yet
make horrible mistakes in writing and read with difficulty. If their
effort to master their Russian is sincere (as is the case with two out
of three of these students) then they are not altogether hopeless. The
only difficulty is to grade them in such a way that the rest of the class
(American
students) won't feel disadvantaged. As one of our colleagues suggested,
the solution is to give the Russian speakers an entry test and make it
clear to them that their final grade for the class will reflect they
progress in this class only.
        Of course those Russians who came to Russian classes just to get
credits for doing nothing are hopeless, and those schools that couldn't
affford to chase them out because of low enrollments, have yet to figure out
what to do with them...
        The problem expressed above is related to classes with mixed
(Russian and American) student body only. At Hunter we offer a number of
classes that are successfuly taken by native speakers - besides literary
courses conducted in Russian we offer a practical translation course and
"English Grammar for speakers of Russian."
        There are a number of other problems with Russian
students--cheating, talking to each other during lecture time, lack of
analytical skills, etc. But
it's another, no less painful problem, which has yet to be addressed...
Emil A. Draitser
Hunter College of CUNY

On Sun, 28 Jan 1996, George Fowler wrote:

> 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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