Teaching of Russian as a Foreign Language

As the school year winds to a painfully protracted close, I had the pleasure of attending my first Ghria Gakvetili ("open lesson"), in which a bevy of teachers dutifully piles into the classroom of another school's language class and observes their compatriot giving a lesson.



You'd think the purpose would be to transfer teaching methods and demonstrate new ways to instill an education in the minds of the Georgian youth. Actually, an open lesson here seems to be no different from an open lesson anywhere-- it's an opportunity to show off what the kids learned and how well-behaved they are. Because of this, I was smothered in a cloud of my own cynicism and disbelief throughout the entire session, a condition exacerbated by the fact that it was a Russian lesson and I don't speak Russky.

The children all sat up perfectly straight, each in matching uniforms. They all raised their hands for every question, and none of them talked between questions. This is where I note that the entire lesson was pretty much a Q&A session led by the teacher, to the tune of: "What is this?" or "What are the days of the week?" followed by the answer, which was then followed by a repeat of the answer by five or six more students to check their pronunciation.

TEFL training taught us that the Soviets were really into teaching English as far as it pertained to perfect pronunciation, as well as the ability to read and translate well. Thus, many of the students here cannot hold up their end of a conversation to save their lives, but they have vast multi-stanza Byron poems memorized. Therefore, seeing the students stand up and recite answers that were clearly practiced beforehand was not at all impressive, and was actually really depressing.

However, there were some things to remember:

1) Their teacher is actually really, really good and exclusively speaks Russian at the lesson. While sitting there and not understanding a word, I concocted the theory that maybe she was conducting such a bland, Soviet lesson to please the parents and other schools' directors, and that as soon as we left she would divide the class into fours for small-group discussion.

2) The students had cute little red flags that they held up when one of their classmates made a mistake, and cute little green flags that they held up when they could offer a synonym to an answer their classmate gave. The red flags probably scare the speakers into thinking over their words for an excessive amount of time before voicing them, something that's hard to unlearn, but they were adorable.

3) Thus concluded the last Monday in which I will ever be in a Georgian school. 45 days left.