Placement of Heritage Learners

[Slava Paperno]

With gratitude to everyone who has contributed to this discussion so far, 
I'd like to share an observation I made in my limited experience teaching 
heritage speakers at the beginning level (we mostly disallow that). I found 
that these kids simply do not learn in first-year classes. My impression is 
that their brains fall asleep, perhaps for lack of sufficient challenge. We 
only learn when we fully believe that we need to learn. When placed in a 
beginning class, these students do not believe that. How can they? In a 
course where all knowledge is totally knew to the student, a student whose 
learning machine is turned on by the challenge absorbs perhaps 75% of the 
information. Heritage speakers in a first-year course already know 75% or 
more of the information that is taught. Their learning machines 
idle  through a class, and they learn almost nothing.

I also teach literacy classes to those heritage speakers who speak 
grammatically correct Russian--that's a prerequisite for the course. I 
don't teach them vocabulary or culture. This is mostly a course is 
morphology and syntax. I want them to learn how their language works. 
That's what our foreign language requirement calls for. The kids have to 
take the course so they can fulfill the language requirement. The course is 
taught entirely in Russian. For fourteen weeks, twice a week, I speak to 
them about nouns, verbs, adjectives, and the rest of it, using Russian 
terminology. At the beginning of the semester I give them a list of about 
thirty terms like glagol, soglasnyj, okonchanie. By the end of the 
semester, half of the students do not know these terms. I do not test the 
students on this terminology and do not require that they learn to use it. 
And they don't. About half of the heritage speakers I know do not absorb 
new vocabulary simply by being exposed to it. Our learning machines will 
idle when they can.

Slava

At 05:53 PM 2/4/2006, you wrote:
>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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