Oscar Swan on Immersion teaching of Polish

[Ellen Elias-Bursac]

Tony,
I was taught Croatian with the audio-visual method as they were teaching
foreign students such I was at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb in the
early 1970s. That meant that I learned whole sentences and phrases without
always knowing where one word stopped and another started. I reached a
certain point in my fluency which worked well, much as is described in the
SEEJ article, and, like AA, I had reasonably good pronunciation and a large
vocabulary so I got away with all sorts of erroneous usage. It took sitting
down to write a textbook with an excellent grammarian for me to see how
much of my language usage wasn't quite there grammatically, especially in
terms of aspect. On the other hand, those grammatical infelicities
generally don't prevent people from understanding me. It's an interesting
issue, how correct we can hope our students to be and how we define
success. Thank you for raising it!

Ellen Elias-Bursac
Cambridge, MA


On Sun, Aug 3, 2014 at 3:11 PM, Anna Frajlich-Zajac <af38 at columbia.edu>
wrote:

> I drink to that.
> It is an excellent study indicating that we cannot throw out the grammar
> with the bath water.
> I hope my English is not totally fossilized.
> Anna
>
> Anna Frajlich-Zajac, Ph.D.
> Senior Lecturer
> Department of Slavic Languages
> Columbia  University
> 704 Hamilton Hall, MC 2840
> 1130 Amsterdam Avenue
> New York, NY 10027
> Tel.  212-854-4850
> Fax: 212-854-5009
> http://www.annafrajlich.com/
>
>
>
> On Jul 31, 2014, at 5:35 PM, Anthony Anemone <AnemoneA at NEWSCHOOL.EDU>
> wrote:
>
> Colleagues! Have others yet read Oscar Swan's article in the most recent
> SEEJ (58:1, Spring 2014, pp.113-131)?
>
> Although I'm not a specialist in second-language acquisition, I have
> taught the Russian language for well over 20 years at 4 US colleges and
> universities and his argument makes a lot of sense to me. I'm wondering
> what the rest of you think about the "immersion" method in teaching
> grammatically-complex languages like Russian and Polish.
>
> Tony
>
>
> Tony Anemone
> Associate Professor
> The New School
> 72 Fifth Ave, 702
> New York, NY 10011
>
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