Suggestions for first-year textbook?

[Peter Scotto]

We're casting around for a new first-year textbook at Mount Holyoke, and I
wonder if I could ask for suggestions?

In the ideal, we would like a text that combines strong proficiency material
with an organized, lucid, and pedagogically appropriate presentation of Russian
grammar.

We tried "Golosa" and "Nachalo" some years back and found that they didn't work
either with our teaching style or with our students. We found ourselves fighting
the books in order to bring order to what we found to be inadequate and
disjointed presentations of grammar.  We finally had to abandon them.

Also, none of us is convinced of the utility of introducing "one-stem" verbs to
first-year students. When we tried to do so, we found that we were spending more
time on teaching students to understand the text than to understand Russian, and
that, in the end, our students simply memorized the actual forms of
conjugational paradigm rather than one-stem schemata. That is to say, our
college bookstore sold lots of copies of 501 Russian Verbs.

I've noticed, by the way,  that Miller and Kagan's "V Puti" (which we use for
second-year)carefully avoids the whole one-stem edifice.

So any suggestions?  I fully realize that what constitutes a good text is as
much a matter of  what works with a teacher's style as it is inherent in the
text itself.      

So if there is anyone out there who has had some of the same concerns that we
have had, and has found something that works, we would like to hear from you.

Peter Scotto
Mount Holyoke College



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