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ON TEACHING A SECOND SLAVIC LANGUAGE: THE PROBLEM OF SERBO‐CROATIAN
Author(s) -
Stolz Benjamin A.
Publication year - 1967
Publication title -
language learning
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.882
H-Index - 103
eISSN - 1467-9922
pISSN - 0023-8333
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-1770.1967.tb00922.x
Subject(s) - slavic languages , linguistics , citation , croatian , computer science , philosophy , library science
SERBO-CROATIAN, like other minor Slavic languages such as Polish, Czech, and Bulgarian, is completely secondary to Russian in the few departments where it is offered. Certainly fewer students are now enrolled in Serbo-Croatian than were enrolled in Russian in, say, 1950. Until very recently no more than a dozen of our universities--principally those with well-developed graduate departments granting the Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures-have offered courses in Serbo-Croatian on a regular basis. Most universities cannot afford a trained specialist fully committed to such a minor field, and so the teacher of Serbo-Croatian usually also finds himself teaching courses in intermediate Russian, or perhaps Slavic linguistics o r literatures. At best, he may find himself cast in the role of the area specialist-the "South Slavic man" who gives courses in everything related to the South Slavic a rea from Old Church Slavic and a history of the South Slavic languages through surveys of South Slavic folklore and literature as well as the modern literary languages. Depending upon the departmental budget, native speakers may or may not be available as teaching assistants; but because of the perpetual low enrollment in Serbo-Croatian language courses, departmental chairmen are understandably reluctant to employ a native informant in addition to a trained language teacher. Not only are class enrollments small (at the University of Michigan the enrollment in my beginning SC course has risen from 3 to 9 since fall 1964) but they a r e diverse. Limited enrollment can be nearly as great a handicap as over-enrollment, for it places a heavier burden on the student and reduces competition, both of which factors lower motivation and interfere with the learning process. Diversity of student backgrounds, however, can be an even more serious problem, for it hampers course planning: a pace and emphasis that will bore some students will baffle and frighten others. Let me give an example. In my first-year Serbo-Croatian course in the f a l l of 1966 there were nine students and one auditor. Of the nine, four were graduate students from the Slavic Department, three were second-generation Yugoslavs with varying degrees of ignor ance of their mother tongue, one was a doctoral candidate in