On Teaching Russian Vocabulary and the State of the Discipline

The question of the particular methodology used in teaching a given foreign language should be approached first from the point of view of the goals of the course. If the goal is to teach students to speak French, it is clear that one of the numerous variants of the audio-lingual method is probably the most effective; if reading ability is the major goal, then clearly a variant of the grammar-translation method is the best. If the methodology used is to be determined by the goals, then the next question that arises is how one determines these goals (traditionally four: speaking, comprehension, reading, and writing). In the best of all possible worlds, one would want to seek to achieve all four. But we do not live in the best of all possible worlds, and, I contend, there is one overriding factor that, for some languages, at least (and as we hope to show, for Russian), makes achievement of all four goals impossible in college teaching. This factor is simply the undergraduate foreign language requirement. We must face the fact that we will have the majority of our students in our classrooms for two years or less; not for four years. Consequently we must try to achieve as much as possible within the one or two years at our disposal. Above all we must avoid keying the first year or two of Russian language study solely to the needs of potential majors, who make up a small percentage of enrollment in those elementary

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