undergraduate Honors in Russian

[Benjamin Rifkin]

At UW-Madison the honors thesis is written in English with citations in
Russian.

Russian is a category 3 language (requiring more than 700 hours of
classroom instruction to attain advanced level proficiency), where as
French and Spanish are category 1 and German category 2 languages.
Students of French, German and Spanish often have substantial learning
experiences before coming to college; with the elimination of many
Russian programs on the high school level in the US, the same cannot be
said of college-level students of Russian.  To my mind, to require
students to write honors theses in Russian is to significantly reduce
the intellectual content of the thesis or to restrict the honors thesis
program to native speakers of Russian and those few American-born
students with unusual learning histories (e.g., parent was posted to
Moscow, grew up in Moscow and attended a Russian school for grades
8-11, etc.)

Sincerely,

Ben Rifkin

On Feb 28, 2005, at 11:30 AM, LeBlanc, Ronald wrote:

> 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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******'
Benjamin Rifkin
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Professor and Chair, Slavic Dept.  (Slavic)
1432 Van Hise Hall, 1220 Linden Dr.
Madison, WI 53706 USA
(608) 262-1623; fax (608) 265-2814
polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/slavic

Director, Center for Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia (CREECA)
210 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706 USA
(608) 262-3379; fax (608) 890-0267
www.wisc.edu/creeca

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