text question for high school Russian teachers

[Janey Haynes]

Good evening.  Our district will be looking to adopt new textbooks year after next, and as the only Russian teacher here, I'd like to have some fresh viewpoints on the texts being used out there.

I am currently using Russian Face-to-Face, which is great for the pictures and the cultural material but very slow at building a decent vocabulary and grammar system.  I do most of that outside the book.  Having taught French and German, I find the text a bit scattered.  I learned from Mischa Fayer's Basic Russian, Books One and Two, and felt like we'd accomplished a lot more when I used it as a text instead of a supplement.   There's another book I've seen by a Ben Clark, but I'm not impressed with it either.  So...
would some of  you share your insights (off-line will be fine)with me?  I'm looking for a text that is grammatically grounded, reasonably recent, and conversation-friendly.

Thanks in advance.
Janey Haynes
Nashville, TN
-------------- Original message from Bogdan Sagatov <vlarubog at HOTMAIL.COM>: -------------- 


> Klawa, 
> 
> I can't find the DoD language difficulty tiering chart online either; but to 
> narrow it down for you, I believe it was produced by the Defense Language 
> Institute. 
> 
> The following link to the National Virtual Translation Center will take you to 
> the Foreign Service Institute's "Language Difficult Ratings" chart. Not exactly 
> what you're looking for but perhaps useful. By the way, all these people are 
> cahoots anyway, so... 
> 
> NVTC: http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/november/learningExpectations.html My 
> Best, 
> Bogdan 
> 
> Dr. Bogdan B. Sagatov, TD 
> CLAS 
> 
> Russian Language Mentor: http://russianment.netSEELRC Webliographies: 
> http://seelrc.org/webliography/Interagency Language Roundtable: 
> http://govtilr.org> Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 17:24:46 -0400> From: 
> kthresher at RANDOLPHCOLLEGE.EDU> Subject: [SEELANGS] Foreign Language Difficulty 
> Scale> To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu> > Dear Colleagues,> > I wanted to check the 
> Defense Department's language difficulty scale (to> compare Spanish, French, 
> German, Russian and Chinese), and have tried> googling it, but when I have tried 
> to go to various links from a couple> of sites, they have been unavailable. Does 
> someone have more ready> access to this information. > > Thank you,> Klawa 
> Thresher > > 
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