Russian Flagship – What I’m up to, who I’m in league with and, for dessert, a nugget of second language pedagogy.

This program is a totally different animal than the one I was on before. The program is funded by the federal government in an effort to promote “global competence” (Washington buzzword alert) in the American workforce. Also, the program has been going for about 5 years, and is still largely regarded as experimental. The methods of teaching Russian at this advanced a level are still a bit doughy, so the task of the teachers and students on this program is not only to speak Russian super great so that the government is satisfied, but also to start to pull together pedagogical guidelines for language study at this level. So that’s a pretty cool project.
Everybody on the program is already at the advanced level, and the goal of the program is to get you to professional or higher by the end of the year. For the language pedagogy enthusiasts who don’t already know this: we’re working on a five-point scale here. 5 is a level that not all native speakers of a language attain – it means constantly being articulate and well-spoken in any context. 4 is essentially fluent – it’s the highest level that most non-native speakers expect to attain. 3 is professional competency, and the level that is required of teachers of Russian in the US and by most employers looking for a bilingual speaker. 2 is advanced, which is where we’re all at now. 2 means that you can communicate in most contexts and understand most of what’s being said to you, but abstraction is hard and speakers at this level tend to use Russian words in English expressions instead of finding the phrase that a Russian would use. So grammatically correct most of the time, and understood most of the time, but still sounding like an outsider. Level 1 is for people who are starting to put sentences together, and level 0 are the ones who are memorizing words and stock phrases. So we’re all at level 2 or 2+ right now (I’m at a very humble 2), and by the end of the program we are all expected to have reached level 3. So far this program has been running for 5 years or so, and 30% of participants have reached level 3, 30% level 3+, and 30% level 4. So.
We spent a few days at orientation in Washington DC (where I saw my beloved EW and we geeked out about Russian literary theory and talked about boys, and, EW, you really should be here, because I don’t think anybody wants to ironically come with me to any of the three (3) cowboy theme bars that are now conveniently located off of Nevskij) and talked about how different this language-learning experience will be from our experiences in the past. At level 2 we can all get by in pretty much any situation and say anything we want to, and the trick now is to start sounding more Russian, which is something that flashcards won’t help with as much. A good example of this: Americans use the word “I” a lot. That doesn’t always mean that we’re selfish – it also means that we take responsibility for stuff. So in English I might say “I missed my bus”. In Russian, you can say “I missed my bus”, and while that’s grammatically correct and everyone will understand you, you’ll stick out like a sore thumb if you don’t say “The bus left without me,” or something to that effect. So that’s the kind of thing we’re trying to learn this year, and the idea is that 18 hours of class each week and daily meetings with individual tutors and living with a host family and joining clubs and having an internship and auditing courses and the main university, all of which activities are required, will get us there. Whew.