Russian handwriting in US classrooms in the computer age

[Melissa Smith]

To add some personal anecdotes to the discussion:

As an American who learned to touch-type in her teens, I can still 
recite the repetitive training mantra "A S D F space, J K L semicolon L 
K J"), and thus find the phonetic keyboard pretty much imperative in my 
dotage. I have done MUCH typing on Russian keyboards, but my most 
searing experience was as a foreign-language department secretary in 
the 1970s, when I used an electric typewriter with an IBM Selectric 
ball, on which the cyrillic characters purported to be the 
"gosstandart" (to use my colleague's phrase), but uniformly shifted one 
key to the right. Typing mimeographs and ditto-masters while shifting 
between English and Russian was hell. I now joke with students that I 
got my Ph.D "because "I didn't type so good," and that I NEVER would 
have completed my dissertation had not the personal computer become a 
fact of life in the early 1980s, when I revised draft after draft to 
incorporate the changes suggested by my readers.

While there is merit in developing flexibility in fine-motor 
coordination, I would suggest that is hardly the top priority in one's 
linguistic-professiional development! 

Melissa Smith

On 9/17/10 8:29 PM, Dustin Hosseini wrote:
> I'm not sure if anyone has thought about this, but changing the 
keyboard
> layout on any PC or Mac is exceedingly easy these days.  All a student 
has
> to do is add the keyboard layout and apply it.  
> 
> Macs come with the normal and "phonetic" Russian keyboards as a 
standard. 
> With PCs, and a Windows-based computer with unrestricted access can 
easily
> be modified to suit the needs of the user.  
> 
> Therefore, these arguments about learners being faced with a Russian
> "gosstandart" keyboard layout in Russia are all completely invalid.  
> 
> Let the learners choose what is best for them, after all, teachers are 
there
> to facilitate their learning, not dictate it.  
> 
> 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
>  Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
>   options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
>                     http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
> 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
-


------------------------------------

Melissa T. Smith, Professor
Department of Foreign Languages and 
Literatures  
Youngstown State University
Youngstown, OH 44555
Tel: (330)941-3462

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                    http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------