Why students do not study Russian anymore

[Pavel Samsonov]

> >There is yet another issue:
> >US students don't read any more. They just don't. According to CNN, an
> >average 16-year-old in the late 90's has a vocabulary of 10,000 words
> >whereas an average 16-year-old in the early fifties had a vocabulary of
> >25,000 words.
>
> How did they measure this? Was it active vocabulary or passive? Those kids
> in the fifties were almost as good as Pushkin.

I myself regard such statistics with suspicion. Yes, it is hard to measure
these things, but in the context of our discussion this can be used: it
supports the idea of students' not reading.

>
> O.Henry is one of the three most popular American writers in Russia of all
> times (the other two are Jack London and Hemingway). He does not have the
> same rating at home. Next time try E.A. Poe's museum.

That's why the guide said I was Russian. O.Henry is much more popular in
Russia than in his native Texas.
There were some political reasons - he was considered a critic of
capitalism.
>
>
> But somebody must have heard of them. K.V. was the MIT keynote graduation
> speaker a couple of years ago, and T.C. was all over Broadway.

Somebody - yes. But not many. There are a lot of really educated and
cultivated people in the USA and like anywhere in the world they tend to
keep a low profile. Yes, I know a professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M who
has read entire Nabokov in Russian. A couple of my students were
exceptionally familiar with the Russian poetry and music as well as with US
literature.
But those were exceptions.

I am afraid that the trend is world-wide. I have visited Russia and the FSU
countries several times recently and I can testify that the youth is losing
interest to reading very rapidly. The US is leading the world and other
countries follow.
The US and other world's cultures are  becoming increasingly visual, not
text-based. This should be considered in education and foreign language
teaching. Maybe we should take advantage of this? Why not?

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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