Suggestions for first-year textbook?

[Lila W. Zaharkov]

At 08:19 PM 02/07/2006, you wrote:
>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
>
>
>you can use LIve from Moscow and skip the one root verbs.  Has video. CD, etc.
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