Anchorage Students Learning in Russian

[Nora Favorov]

Today: February 03, 2005 at 4:32:44 PST

Anchorage Students Learning in Russian
By RACHEL D'ORO
ASSOCIATED PRESS

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) - The littlest students at one Anchorage school are
learning their lessons in Russian, the complex tongue of Alaska's former
owner and a language increasingly important for improved international
relations.

Kindergartners and first-graders at Turnagain Elementary School attend two
three-hour sessions a day - one in Russian, one in English - in a program
described by foreign language experts as a first for a public school in the
United States.

It's serious stuff tackling the 33-letter Cyrillic alphabet and many
consonant sounds not found in English. Russian is spoken as a first language
by 170 million people; it's a second language for at least 100 million more.

"This language takes so long to learn, so this is a great way to do it,"
said Janice Gullickson, coordinator of the Anchorage School District's world
languages office. "We envision a grand product."

The age of the students is what makes the Alaska program unique, experts
say. Many schools nationwide offer Russian as a second language to middle
and high school students.

"What Anchorage is doing is indeed new," said Dan Davidson, director of the
Washington-based American Council of Teachers of Russian. "I think Alaska
has really hit on what we'd like to view as a new model."

The program is being launched with a $490,000 three-year grant from the U.S.
Department of Education's foreign language assistance program. Officials
with the 49,000-student district plan to expand it each year at the
365-student school, ultimately offering it in all grades.

Two Russian natives are among the four teachers assigned to the program. On
a recent January morning, Katerina Huelsman held up flash cards before 16
attentive first-graders.

"SLOO-shai-teh mee-NYA," she said. Translation: "Listen to me."

Up went a card showing slumbering children and up went a dozen hands.
"Spaht!" called out a girl, correctly pronouncing the word for "to sleep."

Only six of the students come from Russian-speaking homes. About 5,200
people - less than 1 percent of Alaska's population - claim Russian as their
primary heritage, according to 2000 census figures. Still, the program was
born in a state with long ties to its Slavic neighbor.

The link began thousands of years ago with Siberian nomads who are believed
to have migrated over the Bering Strait. Eighteenth-century Russians
explored the Alaska coast, imparting geographic names and remnants of their
culture that remain today. Traders established the earliest modern
settlements in the territory purchased by the United States for $7.2 million
in 1867, almost a century before Alaska was admitted as the 49th state.

The relationship took on boundless promise with the end of the Cold War,
said Elena Farkas, coordinator of the Russian Immersion program. Farkas
campaigned for such a program for more than a decade, almost from the time
she arrived from Magadan, Anchorage's Russian sister city since 1991.

The way she sees it, the new program is building a corps of future
ambassadors.

"The time is right," she said. "People look at Russia differently, not as an
enemy anymore. We need to establish a national relationship with Russia -
and one way to establish a relationship is to know the language and
culture."

Russian - along with Arabic, Chinese and Korean - are identified as the most
crucial languages to learn in international relations, said Davidson of the
Russian teachers council, a division of the nonprofit American Councils for
International Education.

Mastering those languages is critical for improving international relations
and the same skills are greatly needed in trade, research, fisheries and oil
development, Davidson said.

Aside from the global implications, language immersion exposes students to a
rich cultural experience, said Tom and Meg Kibler, who enrolled their
5-year-old daughter, Kaitlyn, in one of the two kindergarten classes offered
through the program. Their fourth-grader daughter, Haley, also gets brief
lessons in Russian through Turnagain's program for non-immersion students.

"I want our girls to know the world is bigger than Anchorage or Alaska or
the U.S., for that matter," said Tom Kibler, a former Russian linguist with
the Army who now leads language classes for parents of immersion students.
"The more we learn about different cultures and people, the more we
recognize we have so many
similarities."

Kaitlyn just likes Russian.

"It's fun, really fun, to learn a different language," she said.

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