undergraduate Honors in Russian

[LeBlanc, Ronald]

Dear SEELANGers,

I'm hoping to get some feedback from those of you who have some experience working with Honors theses for undergraduate majors.

Our Russian Program at UNH has for a long time now been offering graduating seniors the opportunity to conduct research -- and write a 30-40 page Honors thesis -- on a topic involving Russian language, literature, or culture.  Although some of the research has been conducted in Russian (particularly the primary sources), the thesis itself has been written in English.

Recently the suggestion was made that our Honors students should be writing this thesis in Russian (this is what is currently being done in our French, German, and Spanish programs on campus, but not in Russian or Classics).

There is some concern that the intellectual level of the thesis will decline significantly if the thesis must be written in Russian, given the difficulty of attaining a high enough level of proficiency in the language by the end of the junior year. 

Do any of you teach in a Russian program or department where an Honors thesis (or senior thesis, for that matter) is written in Russian?  If so, have you been pleased with the results?

Feel free to respond to me off-list (ronald.leblanc at unh.edu) if you do not care to make your views/experience public.

Thanks in advance,

Ron LeBlanc


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