Russian handwriting in US classrooms in the computer age

[Richard Robin]

Dear SEELANGers,

I’d like to get some feedback from colleagues on the issue of teaching
Russian script to beginners in an era of computer-delivered materials.

Imagine using a textbook under the following conditions:

   1. Every exercise is online but also available in the printed version of
   a student workbook (tear out pages, etc.)
   2. Your students have computers that can type Cyrillic, and using either
   the native Gosstandart layout or the phonetic “student” keyboard, they can
   type Russian.
   3. While all the exercises are on line, some are (a) machine gradable
   (simple choose the ending or fill in the blank with an unambiguous word or
   phrase, (b) sentence or paragraph length, submittable electronically to the
   teacher, but not machine gradable.


Questions:

   1. Do you teach cursive basically for recognition and embrace the use of
   all the online exercises?
   2. Do you limit the use of the students’ use of the computer until they
   have mastered cursive?
   3. If you answered yes, to Question 2, what are the limits? How long must
   they write things by hand? (It helps if you calculate by instructional
   hours, where a typical 4-hour a week semester of 15 weeks comes to 60 hours,
   a year — 120 hours). Do they have to write everything by hand or is there an
   acceptable mix of handwritten work and computer work?
   4. Any other opinions you have on the subject.

Either public or private answers are appreciated. This is not a formal
scholarly survey (obviously). I just want to get people to express some
opinions on the matter.

Thanks,
Richard Robin




-- 
Richard M. Robin
Director Russian Language Program
The George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052
202-994-7081

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