language query

[dianna horne]

>As the author of the original query that started this discussion, let me
>be more precise as to what exactly I wanted to know. The point was that
>a language instructor was having students practice the construction "ia
>govoriu na russkom iazyke" (they were doing chapter 3 in "Golosa), and I
>thought they should be saying "ia govoriu po-russki." Thus my question
>was not meant to be some abstract inquiry as to whether "na russkom iazyke"
>could ever be used with "ia govoriu" but whether, in the concrete situation
>of two people asking what foreign languages the other knows, so that
>they can decide which one to use for communication, they would say
>"na russkom iazyke" or "po-russki" with the phrase" ia govoriu".

Emily Tall wrote:

>>From a
>pedagogical point of view, one does not teach every possible variant of
>something to students in their first month of Russian. One teaches the
>usual possibilities. That seems obvious to me! As for the word "substandard"
>or "nonstandard," how, then, does one name what Russians call "prostorechie"
>? I know the word "popular" is sometimes used. What about people who say
>"oni khodiut"? Isn't that substandard - or nonstandard? And shouldn't our
>students know that it is? Emily Tall

This thread reminds of being a beginning Russian student in a class which
continually pestered the teacher to teach us slang (at the time, we were
apparently more interested in being able to swear effectively than in
learning how to form grammatically correct sentences), and being told that
we were being taught to speak Russian "as educated Russians speak," and
that if we didn't understand the 'standard', then we wouldn't be able to
understand what was 'non-standard'.

This isn't directly related to the thread, although the general question of
prescribed linguistic norms vs. actual language usage is.  While we
linguists (and others) might find issues of how language reflects (and is
indeed a primary means of marking) membership in all types of social groups
such as socio-economic class and/or ethnic or geographic group (the 'Moscow
norm' vs. others for example), what the student in a beginning foreign
language class really needs to learn is how to express him or herself most
appropriately in a given social/linguistic context.  This means that the
foreign language teacher consciously or unconsciously chooses to teach
variants of a language which s/he believes most accurately reflect the
current norms of usage of the target language/culture.  Questions of
'correctness' or of 'standard usage' in the context of language pedagogy
should be understood as attempts to understand what these norms are, not as
means of trying to determine what is a 'right' or 'wrong' way of speaking.

Dianna Murphy
Graduate Student, Slavic Linguistics
The Ohio State University