Russian handwriting in US classrooms in the computer age

[Monnier, Nicole M.]

Richard!

Great question - one I was contemplating posting to the list as well. As I
began the semester this year, I was struck by how many students don't use
cursive in English and the added difficulties of this fact for the teaching
of Russian cursive.

As to your conditions, our current textbook (Live from Russia) does not have
online exercises, so students inevitably have to handwrite their textbook
exercises, as well as their exams and quizzes, so learning cursive is
unavoidable at this juncture. I also tell them that they should be taking
notes, and all my notes on the board are in cursive; likewise, when they
head off to Russia (I always tell them "when," not "if"!), they're going to
find themselves in situations where they'll have to read or write cursive.

HOWEVER, I have been seriously contemplating requiring them to learn how to
type in Russian, preferably with the Gosstandart layout (again, on the same
premise that they find themselves in Russia some day with no option of the
QUERTY translit keyboard), if only because it will give them incredible
interactive access to real Russian online (Vkontakte, chat, etc.). I'm
thinking about doing this in the second semester of first-year (ours is a
15-week course at 6 hours/week).

I do not curtail students' use of the computer, though few venture onto the
keyboard on their own in any event.

If our university required all students to have laptops of some sort, I
would be even more likely to require students to learn to type in Russian.

Other than that, I can only say that I am as curious as you as to other
practices in our field.

Best,

Nicole


****************************
Dr. Nicole Monnier
Associate Teaching Professor of Russian
Director of Undergraduate Studies (Russian)
German & Russian Studies
428A Strickland (formerly GCB)
University of Missouri
Columbia, MO 65211

phone: 573.882.3370




On 9/8/10 7:48 AM, "Richard Robin" <rrobin at GWU.EDU> wrote:

> Dear SEELANGers,
> 
> I¹d 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 ³student² 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 students¹ 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
> 
> 
> 

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