PLAIN OLD DUMB EXERCISES

Any Russian learner can tell you, Russian is a huge gob of endings onto which we attach a few words. The morphological burden facing the learner of nearly every Slavic language makes the Quia.Com website a natural stomping ground for any instructor. I use Quia Web for formal homework exercises that accompany the second year GOLOSA textbook, of which I am a co-author. The Quia exercises duplicate those parts of the Student Activities Manual that lend themselves to automatic feedback.

The GOLOSA Quia site is a work still in progress. About half the units have been posted. A textbook for a less commonly taught language (about 24,000 collge students in all) does not generate enough sales, to pay for a branded Quia corporate site. But the publisher is willing to pay for an assistant for the general Quia web site. That gives me a chance to give conscientious third year students a shot at early gainful employment in our field.

Readers of this page can look at the entire GOLOSA Quia site or can sample in-context vocabulary cards for GOLOSA. The GOLOSA site features in-context cards because Russian is so highly inflected. Every noun is really a set of up to ten possible forms, every adjective up to 13 forms, not to mention pronouns and other modifiers. Verbs have their own morphological problems. The infinitive is often (and in first year, usually) the students’ worst enemy — tempting them into incorrect conjugated forms. For that reason, our vocabulary cards don’t look like this:

they look like this:

FIRST-YEAR VOCABULARY CARDS — ДА!  EXERCISES — НЕТ!

If you were wondering why I don't use Quia for first-year exercises (GOLOSA, Book 1), the answer is that the computer age has not yet done away with Russian script, which is still de rigueur and requires practice. Students must therefore still write out exercises in first year by hand.

Beyond first year, Quia's ease of use makes it ideal for on-the-fly activities creation. For example, this year my third-year students asked for more interactive activities on russian verbs of “learning” (-уч- based verbs).

This page is not supposed to be an advertisement for Quia. One could just as easily create online activities in other environments such as Hot Potatoes or in the Assessments section of Blackboard. However, I find that Quia, more than the other two environments, meets my needs both as a textbook author and as an on-campus teacher of Russian.

KEYBOARDING

All students in my Russian classes must learn to keyboard in Russian by the end of the introductory sequence (the first 240 contact hours). They may choose either the AATSEEL Student Phonetic Keyboard or Gosstandart (QWERTY = ЙЦУКЕН). However, as more and more students go to Russia and do internships, I suspect that Gosstandart will become more and more attractive.

Setting up a Russian keyboard, especially in Windows and Vista, can appear daunting. It’s actually a thirty-second operation. But just to make sure that students (and other teachers) manage the process without difficulty, I ask students to visit the my Russianization page.

SMART E-MAIL

I impress upon my students their need to be able to read Cyrillic e-mail from Day 1. I encourage them to write Russian as soon as they can, even if their e-mail looks like a mish-mosh.

But by the third year, I require that all e-mail in both directions be in Russian. Judging by some of the traffic on SEELANGS, our profession’s listserv, that puts our students ahead of some of their professors.

The details on how to do smart, highly formatted, glossed e-mail are available on a separate Enriched E-mail page.