European Day of Languages, 26 September 2017

Language Tasters for Durham County Council Staff and Elected Members

The European Day of Languages is one of the occasions to celebrate language diversity, encourage people to learn foreign languages, and promote language-based cultural awareness. On 26 September 2017, Durham County Council offered free language taster sessions for the Council’s own employees and elected members. Three 45-mins sessions – in Italian, Russian, and Spanish – targeted complete beginners and aimed to provide participants with the basics of these languages, as well as suggest ways to continue learning languages, either through self-study or teacher-led classes.

The taster session in Russian, carried out by Dr Polina Kliuchnikova, was designed to give an idea of the language in all four skill areas – listening, speaking, reading, and writing. As a way of facilitating cross-linguistic awareness, a short questionnaire (.pdf) was distributed among the participants to complete before and after the session. The background in learning Russian among those attending varied from complete beginner to someone who had completed a 10-week beginner course in 2016.

One of the ways to engage the participants’ linguistic awareness was to challenge some of their assumptions about the language as well as activate their wider background knowledge about it. Stereotypical representations of Russian center around its ‘difficulty’, ‘distance’ and ‘lack of similarity’ to other European languages. Our short questionnaire (.pdf) confirmed this: ‘complicated’, ‘different’, ‘hard-sounding’ and ‘exotic’ were the most common associations that participants voiced about Russian at the start of the session.

The taster sessions themselves sought to demonstrate to participants how much they were able to do in the Russian language based on their pre-existing general knowledge and with minimal input from a teacher. The class started with common words of Russian origin in English and this list was expanded by the participants themselves with words like ‘perestroika’ and ‘sputnik’. It then moved to cognates and international words written in Cyrillic script, from кот‚ (cat) or мама (mama), to планета (planet) or компьютер (computer). This gave participants the feeling of a very basic command of reading in Russian and led towards the introduction of the alphabet. Here the participants looked at the graphics of the letters first, finding visual associations with Latin letters or other symbols, matching them with corresponding sounds, then learning one-letter words like я (I), и (and) or а (and/but). This knowledge proved sufficient to move on to practicing basic dialogues in pairs (‘I am N’ – ‘And I am M’), which gave the participants first-hand experience of actually speaking Russian. The introduction of a grammar point (the 0-form of the verb ‘to be’) and some basic vocabulary provided further ground for oral practice. The session ended with a writing exercise: the participants transcribed their names into Cyrillic and wrote a short message like ‘Hello, I am N, and you?’.

At the end of the session the participants completed the final part of the questionnaire (.pdf). This section was designed to reveal a potential shift in the participants’ metalinguistic associations about Russian, and also to establish if the session has helped motivate them to pursue foreign-language learning in the future. Among the answers to the question about associations with Russian, one of the participants, whose initial association was ‘harsh’, now picked ‘softly spoken’. Another described it as ‘easier than I thought, transcribable’; and another still as ‘colourful, similar to other European languages’. One of the participants integrated Cyrillic script (and just acquired vocabulary knowledge) into their answer by writing ‘классно!, artistic/creative looking, love the pronunciation!’.

Six out of eight participants expressed their willingness to start learning Russian. Some mentioned that they were now also more motivated to take up other languages, such as Spanish and Chinese. All participants were awarded a certificate to recognise that they successfully completed the language taster session. They also received handouts to complete further tasks and a list of links to websites that should help them keep up with language learning.