RUS': A Comprehensive Course in Russian by Sarah s> Smyth Elena V. Crosbie (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 303 Most of the material used has come from fairly recent twentieth-century editions. Among the few nineteenth-century sources cited is Archimandrit Leonid, Povest'o Cargrade(jegoosnovanii i vzjatiiTurkami v 1453 godu),Saint Petersburg, i886. This is the source of a quotation referring to Mefodij Patoromskj (2.28) here rendered as 'Methodius of Patorom'. Sreznevskij, Gudzijand othershave the more orthodox formPatarskij, denoting the fourthcentury bishop Methodius of Patara in Lycia, who wrote a work called The Banquet, modelled on Plato's Symposium, extolling Christian virginity. Archimandrite Leonid or his informant may have deformed the surname by the ingestion of an alien morpheme, namely the genitive plural inflection-on in GreekPataron. London H. LEEMING Smyth, Sarah and Crosbie, Elena V. RUS'. A Comprehensive Course in Russian. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002. xvii + 697 pp. Figures. Tables. Illustrations.Indexes. ?95.oo; ?34.95. Accompanying cassette, ? i6.95. IT is a truism of foreign language teaching that there is no such thing as the perfect textbook. Teachers of all languages are accustomed to skip or adapt the contents of their course manuals and supplement them with their own materials. For a less commonly taught language such as Russian where the choice of textbooks is comparatively limited, these practices are routine, especially for the university language tutor, for whom materials aimed at GCSE learners or business travellersare not suitable. It is surelywith this in mind that Sarah Smyth and Elena Crosbie, both with a proven trackrecord of teaching experience and textbook authoring, have produced their new book Rus'.Targetedathigh school studentsorfirstyearuniversityundergraduates of abinitioRussian, the course is described as 'primarilyintended for use in a classroom situation' (p. vii), and as such must purportto appeal as much to the teacher as to the student. To this end, the textbook contains an impressive arrayof differentmaterials:newspaper articles, folk tales, poems, games and puzzles, Russian realia,exercises and group activities. There is great variety here, enough for the teacher to ring the changes regularly without having to use other resources. The book is divided into three parts: Course Materials, Teachers' Guidelines , and Reference Tools and StudyAids. The CourseMaterialspartconsists of an IntroductoryUnit and twenty main units, which each follow a similar pattern of sections of classroom activities organized round specific linguistic goals, such as talking about interests and occupations, followed by a Homework section with written and audio exercises. Each unit states its learning objectives at the beginning and, for greater detail and ease of navigation, there is a course outline describing the functions, grammatical concepts, cultural topics, skillsto be used and linguistic background of each unit. These last two categories need furthercomment. First,for the authorsto specify that a unit makes use, for example, of the skills of 'transcoding information from tabular form into continuous discourse' (p. xiv), indicates 304 SEER, 8i, 2, 2003 the degree of thoughtwhich theyhave given to the usefulnessoftheirexercises, and also shows their awarenessof modern trends in pedagogy. Secondly, the authors make it clear that Rus'is intended not only to develop proficiency in Russian, but to develop awareness of linguistic and grammatical concepts in general. Hence in the third part of the book, one of the Reference Tools is a section entitled 'Language Awareness', in which there are subdivisions corresponding to the units of course materials,where each grammartopic is studiedin depth, contrastedwith other Europeanlanguagesand given a wider linguisticcontext. One of the generaleducational aims of Rus'is 'to contribute to students' awareness of language as a system of communication: to give students a critical awareness of how meaning is organised and mediated through the formsand structuresof Russian and to develop a basic awareness of the nature of language and language learning' (p. 535). In these days when a real understanding of English grammar, let alone that of a target foreign language, is at a premium among students, it is heartening to see a textbook tackling this issue head on and making grammar, semantics and other linguisticconcepts accessible, relevant, and fully integrated into the language learning process. These two aspects of the course to my mind make it a fresh, modern piece of considerableintellectualsubstance. It would appear that Smyth and Crosbie have thought of everything:there is even a checklistfor learnersto tick...