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WE HONOR Dan Davidson for his distinguished service to the profession, for his contributions over the past three decades in shaping the course of Russian-language learning, Russian studies, and international education in the United States, and for his exemplary leadership and vision. Through the years, in his teaching, research, and service, Dan has made us think outside and beyond our present circle of ideas. Not only for those of us in the field of Russian and Russian studies but for all involved with foreign languages, he has given new meaning to the words collaborate , communicate , and commit in this era of globalization. Whether orienting outbound students, faculty members, and researchers or their inbound counterparts; testifying before a Congressional committee that exchange and study-abroad programs are remarkably cost-effective tools of United States foreign policy; serving as a consultant on education to leaders of such newly independent states as Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, and Belarus; or presenting at an international conference a scholarly paper that analyzes empirical research on second-language acquisition, Dan has demonstrated that he is a serious scholar, a gifted diplomat, a generous public servant, a consummate professional. It has been said that he has reinvented the field.
Founded by Dan, Claire Walker, and Irwin Weil in 1974, ACTR (the American Council of Teachers of Russian) over the past two decades has provided thousands of teachers and students of Russian with professional and personal enrichment and growth. Exchange programs, association with colleagues in Russia and other areas of eastern Europe, collaboration on textbooks and other diverse projects involving teaching and learning, and the Olympiadas (local, regional, national, and international contests in spoken and written Russian) have broadened our horizons and have given us unprecedented opportunities. Moreover, for twenty-four years our students, schools and universities, communities, states, and indeed our nation have all been beneficiaries of ACTR's mission. Visiting teachers, students, and specialists have given us new perspectives, new connections, new cross-cultural competence. Despite the vicissitudes of our area, ACTR has remained an activist organization for Russian and related studies in the United States.
We are all keenly aware that the field of Russian is at a crossroads today. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the status of Russia is changing throughout the world. In the United States during the decades of the post- Sputnik era, our field enjoyed vigorous development and remarkable expansion. Our research was recognized as vital to the country's interest. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the language and culture to which we had devoted our careers captured national attention. There were new frontiers: a flow of new ideas about Russian literature, linguistics, culture, history, politics—about all areas of Russian life. The general public and publishers seemed eager to learn more about this mysterious land and its closed society. Then with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the radical transformation of Russian society, we experienced dramatic erosion in our field: declining enrollments, elimination of positions and programs. Some of us thought, “This is a brief aberration. We'll simply ride out this blip.” Others sought comfort in the words of Ivan Turgenev, who declared in 1882, “In days of doubt, in days of distressing thoughts concerning the fate of my mother land—you alone sustain and support me, O great, powerful, just and free Russian language! Were it not for you, how could one fail to fall into despair in view of everything that is taking place at home? But it is impossible to believe that such a language was not given to a great people” (324; trans. altered). Others recalled a folk tradition to relieve grief aptly described by the writer Teffi (Nadezhda Aleksandrovna Buchinskaya, née Lokhvitskaya; 1872–1972), who, feeling out of place as an émigré in Paris in the 1920s and longing for her homeland, for something familiar, lamented in one of her most famous feuilletons, which became a kind of password among the hundreds of thousands of Russians then in exile around the world, “This is all very fine. But que faire? […] Where in the Bois de Boulogne can one find a birch tree and wail?” 1 We, too, wanted to seek out a birch tree, put our arms around its trunk, and wail. Still others tried to ignore the whole crisis.
Three years ago in his exhaustive landmark study Russian in the United States: A Case Study of America's Language Needs and Capacities , Richard Brecht sounded a national alert, focusing our field's attention on its serious predicament and on the complex set of issues that affect learning and the use of language. We were proud that the Brecht study recognized the “competent, dedicated cadre of Russian language teachers at all levels of the education system,” but we were dismayed by the array of problems the study identified. We were alarmed by the “immediate and serious threat to our [nation's] capacity in Russian” (v). The in-depth analysis with its proposed strategies and recommendations for dealing with the crisis provoked productive discussion. I believe that the case study has had positive effects on the profession. Aspects of this report strike resounding notes in Dan's past and current publications.
It seems clear that we in our field are collaborating with one another more closely than ever before as we attempt to make our case to administrators and policy makers at all levels: to convey the urgency of the national need for preparing a new generation of Americans in all fields trained in the languages, cultures, and institutions that populate the territories of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. At the same time that we are endeavoring to disseminate Brecht's compelling message that the “capacity to communicate in Russian is central to the well-being of the United States […] and it is likely to become even more so in the foreseeable future” (ix), we are making special efforts to reach beyond the confines of our departments, to bring together divergent strands of language (pedagogy, evaluation, and interdisciplinarity), to look for new paradigms, new roles, new visions. We recognize the need to communicate more effectively to current and prospective students of Russian the potential for substantial new job opportunities in the private sector. Recently the American University distributed a poster with this succinct but eloquent message:
Increasing globalization and the break-up of the Soviet Union have significantly altered the geography of interests and options for students in Russian area studies. A wide variety of opportunities in many fields have developed for the well-prepared, flexible and enterprising graduate. Beyond current Russian borders, Russian remains the lingua franca for developing nations with great resources and geo-political significance such as Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Armenia.
This type of brief, effective publicity needs to be widely duplicated.
The field has been collaborating in many other ways as well. Through e-mail and through Seelangs and other bulletin boards, we are sharing strategies to increase enrollments and exchanging ideas about effective communications. When programs have been threatened, we have provided testimony to administrators and policy makers. Through electronic links, we are supporting one another, sharing knowledge and skills, discussing ways to raise public awareness. For example, the announcement in late 1997 of The Face of Russia , a series of three one-hour television programs to be shown on PBS nationwide during the summer of 1998, resulted in an exchange of ideas on ways to integrate this veritable treasury of audio and visual riches (opera, ballet, drama, cinema, art, architecture, archaeology, poetry, prose literature, political oratory) into our classes and to focus public attention on the importance of Russian language and culture.
Curricular reform, with special attention to the role of the learner, is another topic that is receiving wide attention across the United States. The Brecht study proposed the “redesign of learning environments, with a focus on individualized and modularized instruction in order to address the broadening range of learners' motivations, goals, and objectives” (ix). In a paper that Dan presented at the thirtieth-anniversary conference of MAPRIAL (the International Association of Teachers of Russian Language and Literature), in Moscow in October 1997, he underlined this focus on the learner. While acknowledging that the teacher and curricular materials remain key elements in the discipline, he emphasized that the critical central position in our field today “belongs to the learner, the subject of a language learning process which will continue for a lifetime.” He challenged scholars to examine more closely the classroom, classroom interactions and the influence of instruction on learning, […] to be aware of the “vitally important data generated each day through their classroom interactions with learners.”
Like those in other fields, we in foreign languages are responding to the demands for assessment and for its concomitant—efficient learning. In the Moscow paper, Dan observed, “[T]he foreign language field must also strive to maintain itself as a serious scholarly discipline, whose ultimate objective is to identify those characteristics of classrooms and programs which lead to efficient learning.” That topic is the focus of Ten Years of Dialogue on the Teaching of Russian , a collection scheduled to appear soon that Dan edited with Betty Leaver. The articles in the volume are as pertinent today as when they first appeared in the ACTR Letter . The 1997 topic for dialogue in this newsletter, “Managing Language Programs,” dealt with such questions as “What should be the relative roles of teaching content, culture, and linguistic structure in Russian classrooms? What can we do to ensure that all students are successful learners? How do we empower them?” These questions recall the focus of the first publication sponsored by ACTR, in 1977, edited by Davidson and Brecht: a selection of papers that had been presented at the 1974 Soviet-American Conference on the Russian Language (SACRL). In the preface of this volume, the editors explained that the purpose of the conference was to seek “informed insights into grammar […] and enlightened decisions about what are pedagogically the most appropriate ways of arranging and presenting the material to the students […]” (Brecht and Davidson i).
A major objective for ACTR and a research area in which Dan and his graduate students at Bryn Mawr have been deeply engaged for a number of years is study abroad. For the past twenty years ACTR has been gathering information that now forms a vast database exploring factors that contribute to the development of communicative competence in American students studying abroad in Russia. An eagerly anticipated publication dealing with this area is now in press (Davidson, Marshall, and Rivers). Whereas a previous set of research papers on this subject reflected data collected by ACTR between 1976 and 1990 (Brecht, Davidson, and Ginsberg), this new publication is based on an extended database compiled in the turbulent years surrounding the fall of the Soviet Union. Both the formal and the informal aspects of language learning in Russia underwent significant changes in these years. Freedom of speech has changed the tenor of classroom discourse, and extraclass opportunities now provide for a true immersion program and new forms of enrichment. Living with families, pursuing internships, and engaging in diverse kinds of volunteer work (in orphanages, in schools, in fund-raising) have expanded possibilities for language development.
In the Moscow paper I cited earlier, Dan described some results from the long-term study that provide interesting data about second-language acquisition during study-abroad programs. He listed four particularly important constants associated with an increase in oral proficiency:
This area of research enacts another recommendation in the Brecht report: the “active promulgation of exchange and study abroad programs” (x).
There are many other areas in which ACTR's objectives intersect with recommendations from the Brecht report. The report urges the “[d]evelopment of a fieldwide ‘Language Learning Framework,’ devised and supported by a national coalition of schools and colleges/universities, and the reform of the curricula in accordance with the framework and stated institutional missions and student goals and motivations” (x). The ACTFL standards for all foreign languages and the Russian-specific standards that we in the field review create a “Language Learning Framework.” This project will be useful in the development of a new curricula, of programming, and of improved testing instruments. Certainly it represents a kind of collaboration that Rifkin calls “the key to our moving forward from a vision of articulated curricula for the Russian field to the ultimate goal of promoting our students' acquisition of Russian” (21).
The report also recommends the “[d]evelopment of a strategy to enable individuals as well as institutions to have ‘on demand’ access to expertise, programs, and learning materials, all of which are accumulated centrally and meet field wide standards of quality” (x). RussNet, a Web site developed by ACTR (http://www.russnet.org), meets some of the criteria of this recommendation. It provides teaching and reference materials, short courses, curriculum modules, and other services for Russian-language learning at all levels. These materials can not only complement existing textbooks and formal classroom settings but also be used by learners independently. Some of the modules online or being developed are designated for heritage learners and for students of business Russian at various levels (beginning, intermediate, advanced).
What is the status of Russian today? Is the field moving ahead, charting new paths energetically and creatively? I believe that reexamination, refocusing, restructuring, and renewal are the predominant modes. Much has been done; much remains to be done. Through collective action, we will continue to address problems common to our field. In 1998, as we celebrate 102 years of Slavic studies in the United States, I believe that we can look to the future optimistically. By working together, by thinking outside and beyond our present circle of ideas, we will succeed in making language-related issues an integral part of the public consciousness.
The author is Professor of Russian at James Madison University. This article is based on her presentation in a session honoring Dan Davidson at the 1997 MLA convention in Toronto, Ontario .
1 My trans. The feuilleton, published in the leading Russian-language émigré Parisian daily, is titled “Ke ep?”, a play on the French que faire .
Brecht, Richard D. Russian in the United States: A Case Study of America's Language Needs and Capacities . With John Caemmerer and A. Ronald Wilson. Foreign Lang. Center Monograph Ser. Washington: Natl. Foreign Lang. Center, 1995.
Brecht, Richard D., and Dan E. Davidson. Preface. Soviet-American Russian Language Contributions . Ed. Brecht and Davidson. Urbana: G and G for AATSEL, 1977. i–ii.
Brecht, Richard D., Dan E. Davidson, and Ralph B. Ginsberg. Predictors of Foreign Language Gain during Study Abroad . NFLC Occasional Papers. Washington: Natl. Foreign Lang. Center, 1992.
Chaput, Patricia R. “Difficult Choices: Planning and Prioritizing in a Language Program.” ADFL Bulletin 28.1 (1996): 29–34. [Show Article]
Cuykedall, Diane, and Ray Parrott, eds. Vision 2020 . Pref. Richard Brecht. Washington: AATSEEL-ACTR, 1992.
Davidson, Dan E. “Empirical Research on Foreign Language Acquisition: Recent Findings from the Study and Teaching of Russian as a Foreign Language.” MAPRIAL Conference. Moscow. Oct. 1997.
Davidson, Dan E., and Betty Leaver. Ten Years of Dialogue on the Teaching of Russian: From the Front Pages of the ACTR Letter, 1988–1997 . Forthcoming.
Davidson, Dan E., C. Marshall, and W. Rivers, eds. Predictors of Success in Second Language Acquisition in the US and Abroad: Twelve Years of Qualitative Analyses of the ACTR Study Abroad Database . Forthcoming 1998.
Parry, Albert. America Learns Russian: A History of the Teaching of the Russian Language in the United States . Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1967.
Rifkin, Benjamin. “Front-Page Dialogue: Coordinating Russian-Language Instruction.” ACTR Letter 24.3 (1998): 1–24.
Teffi, N. A. “Ke ep?” oc e H ue H o ocmu 27 Apr. 1920: 2.
Turgenev, I. S. Dream Tales and Prose Poems . Trans. Constance Garnett. New York: Freeport, 1969.
Walker, Galal. “Gaining Place: The Less Commonly Taught Languages in American Schools.” Foreign Language Annals 24 (1991): 131–50.
© 1999 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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