Why students do not study Russian anymore

[Marta Sherwood-Pike]

A few observations here, based on my experiences a the University of
Oregon.

(1) Students who are not foreign language, linguistics, or area studies
majors do not have time in their schedules for more than one foreign
language, and the one they pick is usually the one they studied in high
school - Spanish, French, or sometimes German. Our school district teaches
Jpananese and Russian, but this is unusual, and the Japanese program is a
bit thin, while the Russian program was such that students with three
years couldn't go into our university 2nd year program, which wasn't
particularly advanced.

(2). Putting native speakers without pedagogical training into first and
second year classrooms invites disaster. For first year Russian I had a
Polish teaching assistant whose English was marginal, who had not a clue
as to how to explain Russian grammatical concepts to speakers of English.
Fortunately we had a textbook that explained things in terms intelligible
to someone who knew Latin, which has a similar case structure. I was one
of two in thirty-one who went on to second year.

(3). This situation extends to other less commonly taught languages
(assuming the University of Oregon is not exceptionally bad among public
universities with respect to language teaching). Several years ago I
enrolled in Indonesian.  The teaching assistants had no idea how to teach
foreign languages, and their supposed supervisor did not observe them in
the classroom. Half of the small class consisted of Koreans and Japanese,
who had already learned a language not closely related to their own
(English), and I, fairly proficient in Russian, grasped the concepts of
the very different grammar, but the other Americans were clueless. Most
American students emerge from high schools without the mental skills to
learn difficult foreign languages, chiefly because they are not exposed to
a bilingual environment in their childhood.

(4). I do not think I would have learned Russian, had I not had two
Russian teachers, one an emigre and one an exchange professor, who had
been trained in Russian pedagogical institutes to teach foreign languages,
the first to teach English, the second to teach Russian to foreign
students of various nationalities.

(5). Russian literature especially poetry is beautiful. Can one, however,
appreciate Russian poetry if one does not appreciate English poetry? If
one is ignorant of Yeats, can the best understanding of each word,
inflexion, etc. of Gumiliev convey the essence of the work? (I picked two
contemporaries both of whom are evocative for me, though their poems are
rather different).
-Martha Sherwood-

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