Why students do not study Russian anymore

[Kat Tancock]

Hello,

This is a good point. Russian departments often don't seem to be able to
keep the students they get in the first place!

One thing I have seen in language departments at our university (Hispanic
and Italian studies in particular) is a trend towards hiring language
instructors specifically to teach lower level language courses. These
instructors are hired for their teaching ability and are freed from the
requisite research that full professors seem to occupy so much time with.
And they are great teachers! Having taken a plethora of first-year
languages, I would say that my Spanish and Italian classes were the most fun
of all of them! And they definitely keep their students - the enrollment in
Spanish has been increasing consistently. I think they're up to 8 or 9
sections now, and, unfortunately, had to up their student limit to 35
students per class. And this is Canada, not the US - we tend to learn French
in high school here, not Spanish.

I would suggest that this is a good way to keep those students you get in
first year, and to attract others, even by word of mouth - good, fun
teachers in the lower levels. This doesn't mean leaving out grammar, but it
may mean teaching them some pop music once in awhile. :)

Kat
--
Kat Tancock
UVic Language Centre
http://web.uvic.ca/langcen
tancockk at uvic.ca

> There is yet another aspect of the problem. Universities normally prefer to
> employ  professors of Russian with a research background - those who have
> published a multitude of long articles in thick journals. And these
> professors tend to teach exactly what they publish - the intricacies of the
> Russian grammar, the subtextual style of Platonov's prose, or the structure
> of Pushkin's verse.
> This all would be fine if their teaching were consistent with the level of
> their students' proficiency. In some (if not many) cases they tend to teach
> ABOUT the language, rather than the language per se.
> In some universities students just attend lectures on the Russian grammar or
> phonetics, without actually learning how to use them. This is a hangover
> from the cold war days when oral skills in Russian were needed mostly by the
> military and secret service. All the rest were supposed to STUDY Russian
> rather than learn how to use it.
>
> Now that the cold war is over, the need for oral skills in Russian have not
> emerged. Russian is not a very promising field of business or any other
> endeavor.
> All the above has contributed to the decline of Russian.
>
> With compliments,
>
> Pavel (Paul) Samsonov
> EDAD, College of Education,
> Texas A&M University
> tel. (409) 862-7771 (lab)
> (409) 862-9152 (home)
> fax (409) 862-4347
> e-mail p0s5658 at acs.tamu.edu
>
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