forgotten Russian - how to restore it?

[Alina Israeli]

For several years I worked with Russian orphans here in Washington DC.  
at their pre-adoption stage. Those were "unadoptable" children, i.e.  
too old or with health problems (many of them had unoperated cleft  
lip). The youngest were 5-6 that usually had older siblings. Most were  
9-14, a few were 16.

One summer they would not know a word of English and would need me as  
interpreter, the next summer their English would be excellent and they  
could not remember practically any Russian. Some none at all. The only  
family where a year later Russian was still in use was a family that  
adopted three children from Kazakhstan (they already had one of their  
own), one Russian and two Kazakhs.

Something interesting is going on at the cognitive level and I  
suggested to my colleagues who do language acquisition to study such  
cases (similar cases were observed in Scandinavia). Their reply was:  
who is going to fund a research that studied forgetting the language  
instead of acquiring one?

But I think studying those mechanisms would be very useful for our  
understanding of language function.

(One similar testimony I had quite recently from a prospective  
student, she was adopted at age 12 as was her girl-friend from the  
same orphanage; and six month later they were discussing that they did  
not remember any Russian. In high school she took it as a foreign  
language. Her pronunciation is obviously better than that of her  
peers. but that's about all. )

AI

Mar 14, 2011, в 2:10 AM, Emily Saunders написал(а):

> I had an odd experience with a young boy in a summer camp for  
> typical U.S. kids aged 5-10.  He'd been adopted at the age of 2 (and  
> was about 5 or 6 at the time of our camp) and had completely  
> forgotten all of his Russian.  We looked for glimmers of  
> understanding with certain basic vocabulary words (мать, отец,  
> кошка, собака), but nothing until we introduced to the kids a  
> simplified version of the fairy-tale Репка (Repka).  While the  
> presenter was telling the story started to interrupt with  
> corrections -- not собака/sobaka but Жучка/zhuchka, not кошка but  
> Муська and so on.  I'll bet you that she has childhood rhymes and  
> stories kicking around in her memory banks that could be triggered.
>

Alina Israeli
Associate Professor of Russian
LFS, American University
4400 Massachusetts Ave.
Washington DC 20016
(202) 885-2387 	fax (202) 885-1076
aisrael at american.edu

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