Placement of Heritage Learners

[Benjamin Rifkin]

Dear SEELANGers:

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I used to work, and now at Temple University, I have found that many of the heritage learners who are interested in first-semester Russian are, as has been stated by our colleague from Brown, Lynne deBenedette, afraid of taking on challenges that they don't think they can handle when they have been told through much of their lives by family members that their Russian language skills are deficient.  

I find that with counselling and encouragement I am able to persuade these students to take higher level courses as appropriate for their placement.  I remind them that they could, in the words of another Slavist whose identity I cannot at the moment recall, retake kindergarten, too, but that that would not be interesting.  I spell out for them the concepts that the students in first-semester Russian will be learning, concepts that they don't realize they already know, and they generally agree that this is not an appropriate course for them.

For students who have weak or no literacy skills, I provide access to our computer-assisted learning program for the sound and writing systems of Russian, START.  (Advisory:  I am the author of that program, I don't mean to use this posting to sell it!)  The students work with START on their own and quickly master what they need to know to integrate into 2nd or 3rd year Russian courses where they can work on more appropriate language challenges without intimidating American-born learners in the Russian language curriculum.  At Temple we are just about to launch a 2-semester heritage-language sequence where we plan to direct such students as of fall 2006.

With best wishes to all,

Ben Rifkin

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