Richard M. Robin

 

Russian Language Program

 

Golosa: A Beginning Course in Russian

Contents

A bit about myself
Teaching philosophy
Getting hold of me
Check my availability on

Courses I teach: Slav 5-6 (Basic Intensive Russian), Slav 9-10 (Intermediate Intensive Russian).

Note: All Russian in the document is based on the Windows Cyrillic code page (1251). The above link leads to fonts that can be used on both Windows and Mac computers.

 

Thank you for visiting my home page. I assume that if you're here, you already know a bit about me: either you've been in one of my classes, or you're thinking of taking a class.
 

What can I tell you about myself, other than what's on my Curriculum Vitae? My area is methodology of language teaching with emphasis on Russian. 

I began studying Russian in 1968 as a freshman at Georgetown University. I spent the summer after my sophomore year and the fall semester of my senior year at Leningrad State University. 

I the mid-1970s as graduate school in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan. and then taught at the University of New Mexico and SUNY-Oswego before coming to GW in 1981.

 

My interest in foreign languages started when I got a shortwave radio for my eleventh birthday, at the hight of the Cold War, a year before the Cuban missile crisis. I still remember the first Russian words I heard: "Говорит Москва" — "This is Moscow speaking..." However, like most high schools, ours didn't offer Russian. So I contented myself with Spanish until college.


Listening to Moscow — 1965

Teaching and learning foreign languages. Until fairly recently most foreign language teaching revolved around the notion of "covering the material." Teachers assumed that students could learn a foreign language as a matrix of grammar and vocabulary. Test the grammar and test the vocabulary, and you could find out whether the student "knew" the foreign language.

But "knowing" a foreign language is not the same as speaking and understanding it. And as a teacher, I have to set goals for my classes that are based not on grammar to be covered, but rather on real-life skills to be acquired. For example, I tell my first-year intensive students:

If you complete the activities as assigned successfully, at the end of this course, you will be able to do these things:

1.      Have a simple face-to-face conversation about yourself, your family, and your interests.

2.      Deal with simple transactional situations (shopping, travel, daily schedule, and so on).

3.      Read simple items in a newspaper, such as weather reports.

4.      Understand simple television broadcasts, such as game shows, short news items about familiar events, etc.

5.      Write a letter to a friend.

Those things require skills beyond grammar and vocabulary — skills which teachers can and should teach explicitly. Much of learning a foreign language is essentially learning to run on empty...

Now, none of this is to say that grammar and vocabulary aren't important. But they are not the be-all and end-all of learning a foreign language.

Of course, foreign-language teaching based on real-life goals requires adjustments not only to what goes on in class, but also in how students are evaluated. Therefore grades are based on all skills, not only the ability to fill in a blank with the right word on a given day.

Finally, our German and Slavic Department functions on the responses it gets from its students. We like to hear from you: what you like, what you don't like, and what your particular needs are. So please feel free to contact me — or whoever your current Russian teacher is.

Мои координаты...
Richard Robin
Chair, German and Slavic Department — Academic Center (Phillips) 509
The George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052
Tel. 202 / 994-7081 Fax 202 / 994-0171
Office hours for 2001-2002: Monday through Thursday: 2pm - 4pm
E-mail: rrobin@gwu.edu