In 2000 I studied the course "Russian as a Foreign Language and Methods of its Teaching" at the Faculty of Qualification Upgrade of the Pushkin Institute of the Russian Language in Moscow.

Here I have written my impressions of this course.

General

I enrolled in this course because I was interested in teaching my native language. I liked helping foreigners with Russian, and I thought that this skill would be a useful supplement to my translating profession. I wanted to learn how to teach Russian, i.e. choose a textbook, explain grammar, build vocabulary, keep the students interested, etc.

The course lasted three months (from 25 Sept. until 25 Dec. 2000). Classes were held every day from Monday till Friday between 9.00 and 14.30.

In 2000 the course cost about US$80 (when I visited the site two years later the price was about $250).

I think the course provided a good value for the money. The other important factor was that there were not many places in Russia where one could take a course of this kind. Besides, this course was the "official" one, held at the state institute whose primary goal is to teach Russian as a foreign language.

However, I didn't learn from this course very much. In my opinion, the reasons were following:

• Three months is too little to learn a new profession. One can be a good teacher only if one has a talent for it and many years' experience.
• In this course there was too much theory and empty talk about "communicative approach". Some teachers only read from their old notes and we wrote it down. I often wondered why they couldn't give us a printed copy of their lectures, then there would be a lot of time for practice and discussing.
• Many of my fellow students were already experienced teachers, though some of them taught other languages than Russian. Unlike me, they knew what to choose from all that theory.
• Some subjects (e.g. country study, theory of communication, computer science) were irrelevant.

I think I could have derived more use from the course, if I'd had more teaching experience and had known better the theory of Russian grammar.

Pushkin Institute of the Russian Language. The institute is located in the south part of Moscow (Academika Volgina, 6) and surrounded by grey boxes of research institutes. The multi-story building on the left is the hostel.

Subjects

Here is the schedule which we had at the start of the course:

	9.30 - 10.50	11.00 - 12.20	13.10 - 14.30
Monday	Country Study (Russia)	Practical Grammar of Russian	Language and Culture
Tuesday	Intensive Method	Intensive Method	Theory of Communication
Wednesday	Foreign Language	-	-
Thursday	Rhetoric	Testing in Language Teaching	Psychology
Friday	Language Teaching Theory	Teaching Techniques	Teaching Techniques

Russian Grammar - My knowledge on the subject was too small to digest the material effectively. We discussed such items as the category of uncertainty, verbs of motion, aspect of the verb, etc. Some of these topics were quite complicated and difficult to explain. For example, the category of uncertainty in English is expressed just by articles, but in Russian we have various means: word order, passive voice, and dozens of indefinite pronouns with different meanings.

It seems very difficult to explain to a foreigner what form should be used in a particular context. We, Russians, just use them without thinking. Learning grammar is not enough, because in Russian for each rule there can be lots exceptions, so the teacher should be able to explain a grammar point in a few concise rules that work at least for 50%.

Our teacher usually dwelled on less important points of the Russian grammar saying "this is very difficult, this is only for you, not for your students". Actually, I was interested only in what my future students would need!

Rhetoric - For me it was interesting and useful, because I'm not much of a speaker. Our professor made fun all the time. He spoke in low and high voices, mixing Old Russian and English words.

The Rhetoric professor (Annushkin) was the exception from others: he gave us photocopies from his textbook and other materials, such as speech exercises. But I think he spent too much time talking about his work in other groups. He was also the president of The Russian Rhetoric Association and an author of several textbooks on the subject.

Country Study - This subject was not really useful. The first lecture was about the disintegration of the USSR. Then I missed some lectures. When I went there again, there was a lecture on how Russia adopted Christianity (the main idea was that it happened least 120 years before the official date of 988).

At another lecture we had a heated discussion about Chechnya, between me ("independence to Chechnya and all regions who want it, leave Moscow Chechens in peace") and other students ("get rid Chechenian mafia in Moscow, we've build so much in Chechnya, how can we give them all that oil").

Psychology - I liked these lectures, even though there were not very relevant for teaching. We had to write everything down, but the professor said everything in a very concise, clear-cut manner.

One lecture was about the laws of memory, how it works. He made do an experiment: gave us a list on 20 words (concrete things) and after 4 min I could say the list by heart (he asked me), also backwards. In order to remember the words, he told us to make a story using them - the weirder, the better. The only requirement was that the words in the story must link one after another.

Analysis of a Literary Text - It was quite interesting and useful. The teacher (Kulibina) told us how to use Russian poetry in teaching the language.

French - The classes were not systematic. We trained a few French sounds and some grammar topics (e.g. the subjunctive). For the credit I retold a magazine article and translated a few extracts from the a short story. The teacher said I made good sentences, but my pronunciation needed improvement.

Computer Science - It was a basic class (e.g. learning Word), so I didn't attend it.

Passive practice

At the end of the course (November 20 - 24) we attended ten classes of Russian to foreign students in different groups given by experienced teachers working at the institute. We were asked to write down our comments and then to make a five-minutes' speech.

Here are my notes for some of the classes which I attended:

Business Russian - The students (mostly from Romania, very conscientious) read aloud dialogues pertaining to business communication, then answered to questions about the TV interview of a Russian politician which they'd seen; the lesson was well structured and quite effective: I only noticed a few words that the teacher pronounced with a wrong stress.

Analysis of the Literary Text - Based on the story Labyrinth by Petrushevskaya (our leading contemporary writer); the students were from different countries, advanced level. It was quite interesting to listen how the teacher explained the inner meaning of words, why these words were chosen by the author (e.g. siyat' and not blistet' or sverkat'), the effect they created. I think, however, that a few words were coined by Petrushevskaya herself, in any case I'd never heard them before (vorokhnutsa, kulyama), I thought it was not justified to draw so much attention to them.

Grammar (aspect of the verb) - That was an excellent class, everything went without a hitch. The teacher's explanations were concise and clear. The students (Vietnamese girls) were well-prepared and active. I picked up two good ideas: 1) The student kept diaries in Russian and let the teacher (only her) read and correct them. They wrote a lot, many pages in Russian! 2) After reading a short text (a description of the countryside) the girls were asked to draw a picture of it in their notebooks and write down the verbs. At home they would be re-telling the story using their drawings.

Speech Development - The students were an advanced group of Chinese; they were would-be translators for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The objective of the course was to train their speaking skills so that can talk about anything (their teacher said she wanted to make demagogues of them). The students were asked to make speeches agreeing and then disagreeing with the statements they had got (quotations from Russian writers and also the Russian proverb Ne rodis' krasivoj, a rodis' schastlivoj (Don't be born beautiful, but be born happy). The students also got a list of Russian phrases for expressing agreement, disagreement, doubt, etc. It seemed to me that the class wasn't very successful, the students said it was difficult for them to speak e.g. in favour of something, if in reality they thought the opposite. I thought this type of work was very useful, but the statements for debating should have be chosen better: only those should have been selected that easily lend themselves for opposite arguments.

I also attended all other Practice classes: Phonetics, Grammar, Speech Practice, Russian for Beginners, Grammar, and Vocabulary.

Students at the Institute

In my group I was the only man. The other students, as far as I remember, were all teaching either Russian or foreign languages. Many of them came from other regions of Russia.

Since the course lasted only three months and the commuting took a lot of time, I didn't have much chance to get to know them and to meet other students and groups.

I saw many foreign students at the Institute who seemed to be doing well in Russian. When I went to the Institute's canteen I usually met there a Norwegian and a Dane who had been learning Russian just two months, but they understood more than a half of what I said and could make themselves understood. They liked that place, but they studied on the exchange basis and did not paid for tuition and hostel. I also saw many students from China, Korea, and Eastern Europe.