Faked placement might hve their logic

[Valery Belyanin]

Dear Sellangers
A very hot topic at the end of the week : )
In Moscow State University (Center for International
Education<http://www.cie.ru/default.asp?id=prog_course_summr>) they
always had a корректировочный
курс for heritage speakers. It strarted years ago when the first children of
the Moscow festival (1957+ 19-22 y.o. that is eighties) arrived in Moscow to
learn Russian (and to get some speciality afterwards). They were pretty good
in speaking but could not neither read nor write. We had special tests for
them and special groups (leaded by expert teachers). Sometimes we had up to
5 groups  (each with 5-7 students) out of 50 filled with these students.
They had special program, were able to read pretty soon Russian classics
(abridged though) and had a lot of tasks to write compositions, watched a
lot of films, and were encouraged to talk on difficult problems.
They never wanted to be in the same group with the beginners.

During Summer Language School in the U of
Pittsburgh<http://sli.slavic.pitt.edu>
we tried last year to place heritage speakers in one group with the advanced
students, they were bored and the advanced students were frustrated. Then we
separated them and placed in a special group and had a special teacher and a
special program. That worked out. The same was done in the Moscow part of
the program. I recall that we had one student who did pretty well but
opposed being "upgraded" (we had tried to place that student in the advanced
group several times) and the reaction was awful: do not touch me, I do not
know anything about Russian, I want to start from the very beginning. So we
decided that it had some psychological reasons.
I mean fake placement is something we have to reconcile with. Sometimes.
--
Валерий Белянин / Valery Belyanin, PhD in psycholinguistics

On 2/3/06, Karla Huebner <karlahuebner at compuserve.com> wrote:
>
> Speaking as a learner rather than as a language teacher, I'd say it's
> At 12:10 PM 2/3/2006, atacama at global.co.za wrote:
> >Trying to enter at the elementary level might have a very good reason,
> besides trying to obtain high marks with little effort.
> >Original Message:
> >Subject: [SEELANGS] "Faked" placement scores from native speakers Dear
> colleagues:
> >I suspect that as long as universities rely on an "honor system" when
> giving
>