September 11, 1997
After two weeks of learning the alphabet, the writing system, and the basics of the sound system from Beginning Russian, our students went to the language lab to prepare their first assignment based on the clips. Some of them worked in pairs. Because each computer had only one set of headphones, they turned the volume all the way up and placed the headphones on the counter. Seven computers seemed to be a sufficient number for the thirty-two students, although some had to wait, because so many of them came at the same time. The assignment took most students a little over an hour.

September 11, 1997
An amusing thing transpired as Slava was watching the students do their first assignment in the lab. Several of them told him that some of the words were not in the glossary. One of the words was indeed missing, but in all other instances the glosses were right there. The students missed these glosses, because they were in black rather than blue. The glossary includes links to our general-purpose dictionary (these are shown in blue) and also glosses that are specific to the context of the story (these are shown in black). The black glosses seemed to be invisible to those students who very quickly learned to look for blue, and to ignore everything that is in black. We'll try adding red as the color that means "this is not a general-purpose gloss, this is specific to the context of the story and deserves special attention."

September 12, 1997
Matt taught the first class based on the clips. The plan for the class was to see how well the students could read the dialogs from the clips, to see how well they understood them, and to practice repeating the dialogs in chorus, in pairs, and individually. We thought that it might also be possible to practice some simple substitutions, but Matt didn't have the time to do that in any of the three sections. Here's a quote from his report:

"The students were able to read through all of the dialogs on their own, both in pairs and individually, and they seemed to have a good grasp of what the words meant. (In all three sections I occasionally stopped to ask if someone could translate a given phrase, e.g. пока суп не съешь, компот не получишь. I would say about half the class in the ten and twelve o'clock sections knew the translations without my help. The majority of the students in the nine o'clock section seemed somewhat less comfortable with the translations.)... Тhe use of the overhead projector [for displaying the texts to the entire class for reading] was very successful. I think they enjoyed reading together and on their own. They especially liked reproducing the intonation [in] the film clips, e.g.the phrase Короткую, короткую, короткую, ах ну на тебе короткую! was a big favorite [at this point the older brother dumps the bowl of soup on the younger brother's head]. The students acted out the words with enthusiasm."

September 15-16, 1997
Viktoria's class acted out scenes from the Brothers episode. She brought a soup plate, an onion, and a carrot to class, and the students enthusiastically portrayed the obnoxious kid. Viktoria didn't have any wet noodles in the bowl, so no one's hair got messed up.

Viktoria reports that one student was having difficulty being an actor, and his partner helped him by prompting him with his lines the first time around and then saying, "Now you say it. With feeling."

September 19, 1997
Matt started his Friday class by having the students repeat after him the lines of the three film segments that they watched in the lab as part of their homework. Matt says, "While this week most of the students performed the repetitions with interest, some were clearly not thinking about what they were saying. If these repetition drills are enacted solely to acquaint the students with Russian sounds, then I think the drills are successful. I'm not sure that they are anything more than this, however, since when we moved to reading, in some cases it was if they had never heard or seen what they had just repeated... In the nine o'clock section, reading seemed to be a bit laborious for the students; words were pronounced with difficulty.

"The atmosphere was one in which no one or two students read loudly and confidently. Therefore timidity and uncertainty became contagious and we moved slowly from one word to the next. I tried to pick things up by asking them to speak louder and with enthusiasm, following the actors in the film segments. For the most part that worked. Following the reading exercise in all three sections, I would designate a pair to read a pair of lines out loud. If the pair had trouble with the lines, I would have them read them again with the correct pronunciation and intonation. Being able to read the lines correctly fostered a sense of confidence in the students, and made them eager to read more."

September 23, 1997
Slava visited and filmed Viktoria's class. Viktoria had the students act out short scenes from the assigned exercises. Each student walked to the "store," "bought" an item, and then a question was asked about the purchase. Slava's impression was that, although every question was eventually answered, the students were often having trouble hearing and remembering the Russian sentences. This was possibly due to the fact that the questions were not repeated exactly the same way each time, and that other questions were asked in between.

September 26, 1997
Slava visited Matt's class and was impressed by how accurate the students' intonation is when repeating and  reading the dialog from the clips. The students were also able to act out three-line scenes without much difficulty, from memory or after glancing at the text. His recommendation is not to spend any more class time doing repetition, but concentrate on reading aloud and acting out short scenes.

October 2, 1997
A change in assignments and course description:

Assignments for Wednesday will now include recording two Lessons on audio tapes--the same tapes that were used for the first two weeks of the course. A Lesson on tape is no more than 15 minutes long, so this work should take less than 30 minutes. This assignment will replace the "Prepare exercises from Beginning Russian" assignment. The reason for this change is that students don't seem to recognize many words and phrases from the book that they are supposed to be familiar with.

Assignments for Thursday will now include doing two computer exercises from the Beginning Russian Quizzes series. This assignment will replace the "Write from Beginning Russian" assignment. A Quiz takes from 5 to 10 minutes to complete. Students should achieve a score of at least 90%, but they are encouraged to "cheat," i.e. look at the grammar notes before typing their answers, or even look at the correct answers first, and then do the quiz for real. The reason for this change is that students don't seem to associate grammar rules in the book with the book's exercises as easily as they used to, in previous years.

A new grading policy in the course: students who complete all their assignments on time and don't miss more than one class will be given an "automatic A." Assignments include all written homework, memorization, computer exercises, and tape and digital sound recordings.

October 3, 1997
From Matt's notes on this class:
"Today's class involved both the overhead projector and the cassette player. The first exercises called on me to play a segment from the film on the cassette player; the students then read from the overhead. In short the point was to get the students to read the segments exactly like the actors in the film: pronunciation, intonation and fluidity. This gave the students a feel for how native speakers actually speak. I got to see the nine o'clock section from the vantage point of a student this week, as Slava taught the class.

"...the students were fully engaged for the whole fifty minutes. I noticed in the nine o'clock section that even those students who weren't speaking were paying close attention and seemed to be genuinely interested, despite the early hour. Like last Friday's class, this one succeeded in forcing the students to speak Russian: after reading the film segments individually and in pairs, the students acted out the dialogs in pairs from memory.

"I noted that in the nine o'clock section, several of the students made the same mistakes when acting out certain scenes. For example, instead of saying "oni govoriat" some said "oni govoriut," and instead of "ty zhivesh'" some said "ty zhivut." To me this signifies that they were calling upon the conjugation forms that they have already come in contact with, on the other hand it may suggest that they were not so much thinking as speaking, or saying what they had already acquired."

October 10, 1997
This Friday class was unusual: on this last day before the break, Slava asked Matt to spend thirty minutes of class time showing the students the broadcast version of Adopting Olya that has English subtitles and narration. (This documentary was broadcast by public television in several countries.) Matt says that "everyone found it very interesting" and that "It's too bad we couldn't discuss it in class."

The rest of the class was spent acting out certain segments of the film taken from the BRTF web page. Here is an excerpt from Matt's notes.
"In all three sections things went smoothly. I usually had one student read say the first six lines from the overhead projector... I would designate a pair to read, and then, shutting off the overhead, would have them act the segment out from memory. The students seemed to maintain interest for the twenty minutes without a problem. As in previous weeks, it was interesting to note that when acting out the dialogs from memory, the students, when misspeaking, would occasionally substitute a word they know for a word in the dialog, e.g. where they should have said "Oni kogda priedut" a few said "Oni kuda priedut." Again, the fact that they get most of the words right when they act out from memory says that they for the most part understand what they are saying. It seems to me that the way in which they misspeak signifies that they are calling on acquired knowledge, that is, they are not so much thinking about what they say but rather speaking without an attempt to calculate what they are saying, to monitor themselves.

October 17, 1997
For this class (Matt's Friday) students were asked, for the first time, to memorize a short dialog (from Olya Kalinina). Matt reports that of the twenty-four or so students, one had trouble (confused words and said meaningless sentences), one was "half-prepared," one memorized the wrong dialog, and one had an excuse for not doing his homework. The rest "did OK."

Matt also reports this on grammar in the video clips:
"The exercises 1.1 and 1.2 were very successful. These little dialogs are a great way to work on a number of grammar rules the students are learning during the week. I got the students quickly adjusted to reading the dialogs in pairs once or twice and then performing them from memory. I tried to pick up the pace this week, and push the students. We made good use of the substitutions, which called on them to replace, say, a masculine noun in the genitive case, with a feminine noun and its adjective. Without stopping to dwell on the grammatical explanations, I did consistently draw attention to the function of a given word in a sentence as the students were reading them to check that they knew why, for example, the word "brat" appears differently in "A brat?" and "A brata net." In the end, it was interesting for the students (and me!) to see just how chock full of grammar these dialogs were: by way of performing them, in fifty minutes we reviewed accusative, genitive, nominative masculine and feminine, including their adjectival endings."

October 24, 1997
Matt reported a difficulty that was easily explained by the examination of the log of the students' work:

"... despite the fact that they should have known what "kefir" is, many did not. Next, one pair of students would read the dialog, then I would have random pairs act out the dialog from memory involving the substitutions provided. Most interesting was the drastic difference between the students' performance of one dialog versus the next. Exercise 1.1 "Kefira ne bylo" from "Where's the Money" was a flop. I didn't think it problematic to make the students act out a four line dialog, but this one proved to be very difficult for them to remember. In fact, even after we quickly translated it to make sure everything was clear, they still had difficulty remembering the lines, forcing me to change things up: once I saw that they couldn't handle all four lines, I had them do two at a time. This helped, but I'm still puzzled by their trouble with this one. In contrast, exercise 1.2 "Chego tebe" from "An Apple" went off without a hitch. "

As it happens, "An Apple" was assigned for translation into English. "Where's the Money" was not; the syllabus said "Watch and understand." A quick look at the log of the students' work showed that in fact some students spent very little time on "Where's the Money." Perhaps we gave them too much homework overall.

October 31, 1997
This week, the students are assigned, for the first time, to compose (and record) a summary of what they saw in one of the videos. In preparation for this assignment, Matt did something new in class:

"I selected four sentences from the transcripts and had the students make substitutions based on my prompting in English. Where the regular exercises give the students the substitutions and the correct case forms, here the students were forced to determine on their own what case a word took and what ending to apply... this exercise also revealed to us that the students are not as familiar with the segments as we thought they would be. [As they read the sentences from paper or overhead transparencies, their intonation wasn't even close to the intonation of the people in the video.] It's good that this was noticed, for now we can get back on track with respect to our important goal of having the students read and perform the segments with the intonation of the native speakers in the film..."

Next Friday, we'll play short segments from the videos before the students start reading aloud. This has been tried once before and proved to be useful.

November 7, 1997
Matt's Friday class was visited by Patricia Chaput of Harvard. Matt and Pat agreed that, in Matt's words, "the students seem to be quite relaxed and confident in their ability to speak (though not necessarily correctly) Russian, and that ... this confidence could prove to be beneficial in the long run..."

In the discussion that followed Matt's class, we all noted that, in Matt's words, "despite the fact that the students watch and listen to a given film segment,.. they frequently do not reproduce either the pronunciation or the intonation of the native speakers in the film,.. even when [the segment] has just been played again in class." We also agreed that it is much too early to judge the progress of their learning.

These notes were not continued beyond this point.