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“НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ЧЕРВЕНЬ 2014 WWW.UNWLA.ORG 17 Gone are the days when university language classes moved at a very slow pace and hardly ever ven- tured beyond the scope of the mate- rial covered in the textbook. University-Level Study of Ukrainian in the US: Is It Only for Foreigners? by Olesia Wallo In my several years of experience in teach- ing Ukrainian at the university level in the United States, I have observed a distinct and somewhat surprising trend: while both of the institutions where I have taught the language are located close to areas with large Ukrainian communities (in the states of Pennsylvania and Illinois), students of Ukrainian descent form only a small minority of those who choose to take courses in Ukrainian. Ukrainian classes in general tend to be very small; and the one demographic which might be reason- ably expected to dominate in them—that of herit- age speakers of Ukrainian—is actually often un- derrepresented. Instead, courses in Ukrainian mostly attract American or foreign students who already know or have studied another Slavic lan- guage and/or are interested in Eastern Europe as a geopolitical region. Why might this be the case? Why are clas- ses of Ukrainian offered, for instance, at the Uni- versity of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign (a mere two hours away from Chicago) taken by so few stu- dents from Chicago’s sizeable Ukrainian diaspora? It appears that there are several common miscon- ceptions that prevent some of these students from taking Ukrainian at the college level. The most significant mis- conception is these students’ as- sumption that they already know Ukrainian well enough and need not invest any more time studying it. After all, they grew up in an envi- ronment where Ukrainian was spo- ken at home and in the community, and many of these students have spent years attending a Ukrainian Saturday school. While Saturday schools in Ukrainian diaspora communities certainly lay in- valuable groundwork, overall they do not and cannot be expected to produce fluent speakers and writers of Ukrainian—especially if the stu- dents they teach do not regularly speak Ukrainian at home and in other contexts. After all, master- ing a language is hard work that requires many hours of study. Just think of all the years school- children and university students in Ukraine spend learning Ukrainian, and they have the greatest advantage of all—they are studying their native tongue in which they function on a daily basis! The second misconception about universi- ty classes of Ukrainian in the United States is that they are too easy for students of Ukrainian de- scent who grew up in Ukrainian-speaking families in the diaspora. While it is true that many of these students do not need to learn the language from the very beginning, most of them can still benefit from taking even the lower intermediate courses. These classes develop essential grammar skills, such as the better handling of case declensions and verb conjugations, and build a broader vo- cabulary in standard modern Ukrainian. Gone are the days when university language classes moved at a very slow pace and hardly ever ventured be- yond the scope of the material covered in the textbook. Modern, up-to-date language courses of- ten incorporate authentic cultural materials such as short fiction, newspaper and magazine articles, websites, radio and television programs, car- toons, YouTube videos, and films in the language studied. This vari- ety of sources is meant to expose the students to different registers of language (formal, colloquial, slang, etc.) and help them develop greater language proficiency fast- er. In addition, the textbooks and other available resources for learning Ukrainian as a foreign language have improved in recent years, in response to the general trend in contemporary language teaching towards intensive and culturally authentic instruction. As a result, my students who complete the first year of Ukrainian at the University of Illinois—even if they started out as absolute beginners—can converse on a variety of topics, including family, education, work and lei- sure, health, traveling and tourism, etc. By the time they finish their second year of study, they are able to discuss various Ukrainian cultural tra- ditions, city life, the educational system in the United States and in Ukraine, books, cinema and theater, and even politics (albeit to a limited ex- tent). They can also pick up and read almost any
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