LAST SEMESTER we started a pen pal communication with students in Saransk, Russia. If you are studying a foreign language, what can be better than communicating to native speakers? All students in my classes had a chance to do it, and most benefited from it.
Douglas Crowder, who took Russian 102, wrote this about his experience, which speaks for itself:
The Russian 102 Evening Class (plus Olivia)
Очень хороший опыт (A Very Good Experience)
The pen pal program was a bit intimidating at first, especially considering that I am only in my second semester of Russian. But after I received my first email from my pen-pal, Anya, my worries were put to rest. She was very nice and, more importantly, patient.
Anya constructively pointed out mistakes which I made in case declension and formality. I addressed her formally at first which she told me was not necessary as I was speaking to someone my own age. She also corrected me when I mixed up some gender-specific endings.
The pen pal experience certainly taught me some lessons that I might otherwise have missed out on, but more importantly it served as a conduit through which I could extend my newly developing language into the real world. Realizing that what you are learning has value and purpose outside of the classroom is priceless. It is nice to score well on tests or quizzes, but that doesn’t seem to carry nearly the weight of recognizing that all of a sudden you can communicate with a native speaker who is not your teacher (no offense to Professor Ingle). It is an excellent way for us students to track our progress with the Russian language in the real world.
The pen pal experience also reminded me why I signed up for Russian in the first place. I took on the Russian language with the hope of one day opening a line of communication with a people I would otherwise not be able to connect with. That hope is now reality.
And I have a couple of suggestions for ways to improve the correspondence:
I know it may be difficult, due to the required participation on the other end, but I would suggest making the correspondences a weekly or biweekly assignment. If more responses were required, I feel they would prove even more fruitful and that typing on a Russian keyboard would eventually become second nature.
I would also suggest conducting a video correspondence, maybe twice a semester in the computer lab. If it were done at the beginning of the semester it would allow students (in both places) to put faces to names and make for an even more personal correspondence.
До свидания (see you soon),
~ Douglas Crowder
