<p>My niece was accepted to Bryn Mawr college. She was taking Russian at High school and very interested in Russian culture and language. Anybody knows anything about their Russian program? Apparently they also have Flagship Russian? Does it make their program stronger? Thank you.</p>
<p>You might post this in the Bryn Mawr College forum where you’ll probably get more responses.</p>
<p>I can’t speak to the specifics about your niece’s chosen university. However, the Language Flagship Programs are designed to bring students to a much higher level of language proficiency than regular college language programs. They are intense and require students that are willing to put in the time and sacrifice to acheive this level of proficiency.</p>
<p>As a prospective Russian major, I doubt you will find a better college than BMC. I was fortunate enough to have Dan Davidson as a Russian professor at Amherst, after he had just finshed grad school at Harvard. He was brilliant, inspirational and tranformative. That was long ago, of course, but I assume he has put togther a first-rate program at Bryn Mawr, where he has been for almost 30 years now.</p>
<p>I was a Russian major in college (not Bryn Mawr), and most of the materials used by other college programs in the US are developed at Bryn Mawr. They pretty much set the standard across the US, are the leaders in the professional organization for teachers of Russian. They also have pretty close ties with the security community, DOD, etc. which you might view as either a plus or minus, depending.</p>
<p>My D was a Russian language minor at Bryn Mawr. She had not taken Russian in high school and when she went to Moscow to participate in a foreign study theater program (after two years of Russian at BMC), she found that her language skills were far superior to many of her peers who had studied Russian in high school and college.</p>
<p>From what I gather, the Russian program at BMC is very well regarded. Dan Davidson (mentioned above) was, in my D’s opinion, one of the best profs she had at BMC. Another plus of BMC, as I see it, is that students can easily interact with faculty and gain the benefits of such interactions. I’d second the suggestion that you post on the BMC board, I’m sure you’ll get additional information there.</p>
<p>Dan Davidson is an old professor and comes to campus once a week. He is great, but he doesn’t teach much. My daughter (Haverford college) took First Year Russian in Bryn Mawr, and Dr. Davidson taught just one hour a week, teaching assistants taught other seven hours. When my daughter was in high school, most of her teachers had graduate degrees. I didn’t want to pay for the classes taught by grad students. My daughter studied Chinese during her second year, and people who taught her classes, all had doctorate degrees.</p>
<p>It’s true about TAs. I just finished their RLI (Russian language institute) program, and our coordinator and instructor was a teaching assistant. She wore dyed jeans, skimpy outfits and mini dresses and was very bossy and overbearing sometimes. We had a couple of people with doctorate degrees though. Two years ago, when my cousin was doing RLI, all the instructors were graduate students. It’s OK overall…</p>
<p>PhDs are both over- and under-qualified to teach introductory language courses. A good, native-speaking TA, well trained and using good quality materials, is all anyone can expect, and is fine.</p>
<p>Having a PhD teach language classes is like having a brain surgeon taking blood pressure and weighing patients…</p>
<p>It’s funny about brain surgeon… I agree that most TAs are fine. Some of them don’t have enough teaching experience though. Our overbearing RLI instructor/coordinator made us do weird assignments a professor with years of experience wouldn’t assign. TAs do know the language, but they don’t have much teaching experience!</p>
<p>Very, very few TAs, and even fewer native-speakers know anything about language teaching pedagogy. There are also some professors who don’t either. It can make a BIG difference. At my older d’s LAC, they used to hire “instructors” who had Ph.Ds (or at least M.A.s) in language pedagogy as well as being able to teach specific languages.</p>
<p>Qualified language TAs are found in plenty of big research universities. At the university where I studied TAs had to have a year of prep before they were allowed to teach languages. The prep involved courses on the philosophy of this particular method of teaching; lessons on most effective ways to present certain concepts; lessons on how to engage students; how to spot and address student weaknesses, among others.
In their first year of teaching TAs had drop-in evaluators/mentors sitting in on the class. Student evaluations and student performance on department-wide exams were taken very, very seriously. Any TA who could perform up to standard wasn’t allowed to teach.
All of these TAs were in the PhD program and while they were studying literature, the ability to teach language is deemed essential to even get an interview, so the experience was crucial in their careers. Most professors freely admitted they would have hated and not been terribly effective teaching ‘comment-allez-vous’ on even a part time basis.</p>
<p>I would think that most professors of Russian, French, or whatever would know little or nothing about language teaching pedagogy, which is why I described them as underqualified to teach introductory languages as well as overqualified.</p>
<p>Teaching people new languages is an important function of a university or college, but it doesn’t jibe well with standard academic training or tenure factors. Everyone has some sort of alternative system for it; some work better than others. It sounds like Smith’s is terrific, but a college can have a successful language program without going that far. I don’t think everyone can sit back and trust that it will just happen, of course. Language instruction requires planning and training, even if not necessarily a PhD in language pedagogy.</p>
<p>^^ just to clarify, my description involved two language departments which didn’t offer PhDs in language pedagogy. These students weren’t even students of linguistics (different department) These were Phd literature students in various Romance Languages and or Comparative Literature who taught language as a way of getting through grad school. </p>
<p>My point is that many GOOD universities will take their language instruction seriously and offer it at a very high level – but through TAs, and NOT their professors.</p>
<p>I don’t think RLI TAs are literature people. I wouldn’t like a literature person teach me Russian. My mom has M.A. in literature and she always tells me that literature people need language mostly to read originals, they’re poor language teachers (linguists are better language teachers). I agree with Mini: methodology is important. I wonder where they get M.A. in language pedagogy, I might be interested, if I choose to continue my Russian studies.</p>
<p>Well, the people who run one of the top comparative literature departments in the world disagree with you! As do their students who themselves go onto being professors at the most elite schools possible. But hey, you can have your opinion, lol</p>
<p>PS Don’t take my word for it: research yourself who teaches languages at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley or Chicago</p>
<p>So…I’m not sure what to make of this. My d. is working on her Ph.d/certificate jointly in musicology and Italian studies at P. The senior lecturer who oversees Italian instruction is a specialist in language instruction, but they do use graduate student TAs. My d. would also tell you that the language instruction is decidedly inferior to that which she had at Smith (and based on her Smith degree, they waived all of her graduate school language exams, something that, apparently, they don’t do for their own students.) Her language instructors at Smith were either lecturers with specialization in language pedagogy, or professors - even at the 100 and 200 level.</p>
<p>But I would also note that the quality of language instruction differs radically even at the LACs. The quality at my alma mater (#1 LAC) isn’t anywhere close to what it is at my d’s.</p>
<p>mini, as someone who’s married to a former academic who taught a foreign language as a grad student, I can tell you that those poor professors who had to (because I bet they didn’t choose to!) teach “comment allez-vous” and its equivalents in other languages – boy, I bet they were miserable sods! It’s a definitely down-market thing to do, even at a good school like Smith. Obviously language pedagogy is different, but my hunch is that if they were teaching language as instructors (not associate professors) indicates they couldn’t find a ‘real’ academic job (tenure track, etc.) and hence were doing this probably while job hunting. Lots of those folks show up every year to interview (again and again) at the MLA convention!</p>
<p>“But I would also note that the quality of language instruction differs radically even at the LACs.”</p>
<p>It does, as does the quality/commitment of your fellow students. This is very unlikely to be an issue with Russian anywhere you study it. But if you want to take French or Spanish – languages that attract students who are just trying to get requirements out of the way – being surrounded by less able or less committed students is a chore. There was a world of difference between my LAC Spanish and Japanese introductory classes, even though both had great professors.</p>