Teaching ... or not Teaching

Over at the Science Blogs the Seed Overlords have asked the bloggers "What makes a good science teacher?" You can read their answers over there, but reading all the posts got me thinking ...

Not that I'm a science teacher, but I do teach. And while I most certainly don't think that "if you can teach something, you can teach anything", I do believe that many things are common to all teachers.

So I'd like to talk about something that happened earlier this week.

I had a student making up some grammar work. I was looking over her shoulder as she sat there, staring at her paper... it was short form adjectives.

A brief digression for those who don't know (which is probably most of you): Russian adjectives come in two forms, called (not surprisingly) long and short. Long form adjectives are attributive, that is they directly modify nouns: chelovek vysokiy = the tall man. Short forms, on the other hand, are predicative, meaning, they 'really' mean "is handsome, is sick, is sufficient" and so on: chelovek vysok = the man is tall. Russian adjectives also agree with their nouns in number, gender, and case.*

Back to the story. The question she was working on was simple: there were a number of long form adjectives in masculine nominative singular, and she was to provide the short form. She had filled in a few of them - the ones that she'd obviously memorized.

Looking at what she'd filled in, I could see a pattern: she'd gotten the ones that take what's called a fugitive (or fleeting) vowel: bolnoy - bolen; spokoynyy - spokoyen; dovolnyy - dovolen. She had blanks for the others: krasivyy - ?; vysokiy - ?

So I thought I'd give her a hint. "Why are you putting the E in?" I asked.

"I don't know... It's supposed to be there, isn't it? Isn't it?" She started erasing it out of bolen.

"No, no," I said. "Not 'why are you doing that, dummy?' It belongs there! I meant, 'what's the reason for it?'"

She honestly didn't know. Somewhere along the way, she'd memorized these not-really-irregular, very common short forms, but no one had ever explained to her what was going on.

So I started off with the Socratic method, trying to make her understand that she understood. "What does the E do?" She looked at me, uncertain. "What if the E wasn't there?"

She looked at the words. "You couldn't pronounce most of them?"

That's close enough. The fugitive vowel is placed between the final consonant of the root and any consonant-beginning suffix. You certainly could pronounce "spokoyn", and probably "dovoln" for that matter, but she had focussed on the consonant cluster, which is the key. "So," I asked, "these others, you don't need the E. But what makes you need the E in this group? What did you do to make that cluster show up?"

"Took off the ending," she said, paused, and then wrote krasiv.

"That's it," I said, and she confidently filled in the rest.

Now - she went at it backwards, having memorized what she called the "irregular" ones. They aren't irregular: the fugitive vowel is a perfectly regular and predictable phenomenon. You just need to know a little bit about where they come from and when they show up. (It has to do with Russian root and syllable forms, and an historical loss of certain vowels... Think of it as similar to the way the E shows up in the past tense of some English verbs - in pronunciation, I mean, not spelling - but not others: hated, batted, but played, skied.)

To make a short-form, predicative adjective you replace the long-form ending with the short-form one. For masculine, that means replacing -YY (or IY or OY) with the zero ending, meaning that, for instance, krasivyy is krasiv and vysokiy is vysok, and so on.**

If the stem of the adjective has the adjectival-making suffix N, so that it's root+N, as in bol-n or spokoy-n (Y is a consonant), you have an impermissable consonant cluster. (It's the adjoining of stem and suffix that makes it impermissable, not the actual consonants involved.) So the fugitive vowel comes in (back, actually - it's as if we didn't write the silent E in words like "hate" until we added the D of the past tense so that we didn't have T+D together). So, instead of boln, it's bolen.

The point being, whoever had this woman for basic grammar should have made it clear that making the short form adjective was a completely regular process: remove the ending, insert the fugitive vowel if required. Instead, someone assumed she'd just figure that out when the "irregulars" were listed.

It didn't happen. She memorized those few forms and floundered without the rule.

So... what's my point? I guess it's that language teachers need to remember that adults aren't acquiring their second language, they're learning it. This means that many, probably most, of them will not generalize the rule the way children do. Things need to be explained to them.

I don't teach beginners; the students I get are intermediate level. Most of them have memorized a lot of patterns, but have no feeling for the reasons for what look like exceptions. I've had a lot of students tell me they "never understood it before." It's very gratifying to see them understand - to actually see the moment when it becomes clear.

That's why I teach. My evaluations say I'm good at it. I like that.

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* Russian has two numbers (singular and plural), three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and six cases (nominative, genitive, accusative, dative, instrumental, and prepositional (also called locative) - plus remnants of a couple more, found mainly in fossilized phrases).

** For those who are wondering, for feminine you replace -AYA or -YAYA with A or YA; for neuter you replace -OYE or -YEYE with O or YE; and for plural you replace -IYE or YYE with I or Y. Easy peasy. That means, no fugitive vowel in the short form, since the N becomes part of the new final syllable: bol+n+- = bolen, but bol+n+a = bolna