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FYI Research: |
Laura Janda was nervous about attending a conference in Russia to discuss her new methods of teaching Slavic grammar. Although she speaks Russian and Czech, she's not a native speaker of any of the Slavic languages, and it's tough to present a paper in Russia. The presentations can last an hour and a half, and if the audience doesn't like what you're saying, they let you know right in the middle of your talk. Then when you finish, you drink tea and discuss your ideas -- for hours. "The conversations are epic," Janda said. Janda's method includes using rocks, sand, blocks of wood and ping pong balls to explain the complexities of Slavic grammatical categories such as case and aspect, which require adding a marking to every noun, pronoun and verb in a sentence based on relationships among objects and ideas in the sentence. "A lot of the categories have never been described even by theoreticians very well," Janda said. "And it's hard to teach them to students. It's painful, actually." According to Janda, it's possible to spend several years learning a Slavic language and still not know the meaning of a sentence. "It's a myth that the divisions of grammatical categories are infinite and chaotic. They are actually quite finite and well ordered," she said. But no one has ever explained that to students. "The textbooks only give about five percent, and they give you random little bits of it," Janda said. Her students react in one of two ways to her comprehensive methods -- wild enthusiasm that they can actually learn the language, and anger that they've been struggling with it needlessly for so long. Janda works on aspect, a grammatical category that has to do with how people conceptualize time. There are just two types of aspect, perfective and imperfective, but it's complicated. "You can go through entire books of lists explaining when to use different aspect endings, and it looks grotesque because they seem totally unmotivated, just this random horror," Janda said. But with her rocks and sand, aspect begins to make sense. For example, two rocks can never occupy the same space, but two piles of sand can easily be mixed. The two rocks represent sequencing -- when two things happen one after the other, requiring the perfective aspect. The two piles of sand mixed together represent simultaneity, which uses the imperfective aspect. Or say you embed a rock in a pile of sand -- one thing happens (perfective) as another is going on in the background (imperfective). Students of the Slavic languages get it, and it's fun. Janda needs to test her methods further. It works for native English speakers, but does it make sense to, say, native Russian speakers? She is conducting a study using a 31-question survey to find out. The questions ask native Russian speakers to identify which configurations of blocks of wood and sand best represent the use of verbs in a sentence. "I think either it's going to be completely worthless data or it will be dead on," Janda said. Either way, she's excited about doing the work because to her, the ability to speak other languages is a gift, and many of the world's languages are endangered. "It's like watching the rainforest being destroyed. Languages are incredibly rich, and the fact that we're losing this richness is a great tragedy in my eyes. The variety of language is part of the genius of what it means to be a human being." Janda, professor of Slavic linguistics, received a Johnston Center Fellowship to continue her work developing books to teach about grammatical properties in several Slavic languages. To view the books, visit the Slavic and East European Language Resource Center at www.seelrc.org. Her trip to Russia was funded by the Ford Foundation. |