Karen Evans-Romaine
Karen Evans-Romaine is a Professor of Russian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She describes her multilingual upbringing and what it was like to learn three languages while in college. She walks us through half a century of language education, highlighting how practices differ not only compared to the past, but at present between different languages. She provides an overview of the Russian Flagship Program and describes how they have adapted in response to Covid-19.
Карен Эванс-Ромейн - профессор русского языка в университете Висконсин-Мэдисон. Она описывает свое многоязычное воспитание и каково было изучать три языка в университете. Она описывает полвека языкового образования, подчеркивая насколько разные методы образования изменились по сравнению с прошлым, и насколько они в настоящее время различны среди разных языков. Она дает обзор русской флагманской программы своего университета и описывает, как они адаптировались в ответ на Covid-19.
“...I feel that a knowledge of Spanish is incredibly important for anyone living in the US [...] But it’s also important to me that students have the opportunity to take a variety of languages, so I only greet with enthusiasm programs that support studying less commonly taught languages. It’s an important part of our education, too.”
Claire Darmstadter
Hey everybody, I am so lucky to be joined today by Karen Evans-Romaine, Professor of Russian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as the wearer of many other hats. So thank you so much for taking a couple minutes to chat with me.
Karen Evans-Romaine
It's a pleasure. Thank you.
Claire Darmstadter
Yeah. So first, it'd be great if we could just get a really general overview of your educational and linguistic background and how you kind of ended up here in Madison.
Karen Evans-Romaine
Sure, ah, let's see, I have. I started taking languages in third grade, I was very lucky to be in a public school system that was well funded. But they did not have languages for elementary school students. So my parents were always on the lookout for opportunities for me to take languages. And at my particular elementary school, they offered French and Spanish in a before-school program. So I started taking French before fourth grade, before school starting in fourth grade. So I've taken French since I was eight. And I took French throughout high school. Then I went to high school in Bethesda, Maryland. And then I graduated from Oberlin and there I got a degree in Russian and Soviet studies, and a degree in piano performance. So I have a double degree. So linguistically at Oberlin, I kept up with my French; I lived in French house, so that I could keep up my French and began to study Russian the J term — Oberlin has a January term — of my freshman year. And so I caught up, I did the first semester in that January and did the second semester and caught up with the other students starting in the spring. So I studied Russian starting my first year, added German doing the same J term thing in my third year. And I took French for the first time to remember, I think, three semesters. So eventually, I had to set French aside but lived in French house for three years. So I was trying to alternate and balance three different languages that Oberlin: Russian, German and French, but Russian was my major. And then I did grad school at Michigan, in Slavic languages and literatures. I wrote a dissertation on Boris Pasternak on the intersections between his work and German romanticism. So I kept up my interest in Russian and German there. And in graduate school at that time, if you got a doctorate in Slavic you had to study French and German and another Slavic language. And as the Slavic language, I chose polish. So I took Polish for three years at Michigan, and studied in Poland, I studied in Germany, in 1989-90. And in Poland, in the summer of ‘90, so that was a really, really wonderful year to be in Germany and Poland when the wall fell. That was really fortunate. So then I worked in Moscow afterwards while I was working on my dissertation. Did that answer your question?
Claire Darmstadter
Yes. Oh, my gosh, that is fascinating.
Karen Evans-Romaine
Okay, good.
Claire Darmstadter
You have an incredible background it sounds like. So if I understand correctly, it looks like you've taught and you've lived and you learned in a lot of different places. And I would imagine that through the years, it's been kind of an evolution in theories around language acquisition and teaching, just kind of how we view language. So are there any big takeaways you can notice from all those years is that things have gotten better? Have they gotten worse? Have we become more embracing of languages? What has that change looked like?
Karen Evans-Romaine
Wow, that's a really big question. So I think I'll take little different facets of it. So the facet of theories of teaching language, that changed radically from the time I was a graduate student until, and I guess starting when I was no, even an undergraduate student, until I started teaching, started my full time teaching career in ‘96. So I started French in elementary school, in what then I think, was a very innovative way. I didn't see a single written word of French for two years. So only in my third year of French in sixth grade did I actually begin to see what written French looks like. And boy, was that a shock, but that it was a really wonderful thing as a kid to be exposed to a new language, only through speaking and hearing for me, I found that that was a very, very productive thing. And teaching listening has been my favorite thing to do ever since I'm very, very interested in the way we perceive language by listening to it. When I started studying Russian, the predominating method of language teaching was grammar translation. And so we did a lot of exercises. We did a lot of translation exercises. We did a lot of fill-ins. And so what that gave me was in a very, very solid knowledge of morphology. And of basically grammar and structure. And that turned out later to be an extremely useful thing once I was trying to attain a professional level of proficiency in Russian, I had that basis there. The disadvantage of the very traditional grammar translation method was that when I first studied abroad in Russia in the Soviet Union in 1985, that was my eighth semester, I really couldn't speak that much. And I really, really, really, really couldn't understand. So that taught me some very good lessons in both directions. We had to take entrance exams on our way into Leningrad, we took everything in Finland, and I realized during that listening exam that I absolutely did not understand anything that was on that tape, I mean, isolated words, but that was it. Fortunately, I had a lot of independent studies as an undergraduate so I got a lot of practice just talking through these independent studies and in Russian house and, and all sorts of cultural activities that we did. But the classroom approach in itself was not communicative. And so in graduate school, this was the mid 80s, there was a transition then, and I realized that Russian is always behind German and always way behind the romance languages in terms of changes in theories of language acquisition. So when I was trained to be a graduate instructor, a graduate TA, the predominating method then was no longer grammar translation, but it was under the strong influence of audio-lingual, I was trained to drill language in the Rassias Method. So the class was together, we were all talking all the time, but I was constantly putting students under pressure by doing choral reps and alternating, calling on people in a very rapid, rapid environment. And that was extremely productive for some students, and extremely stressful and unproductive for other students. So again, like any method, it had its advantages for some, its disadvantages for others, what it taught was for someone to be able to produce certain fragments of speech very quickly, and under highly stressful, very automated circumstances. And that's the tie that I see to the audio lingual method where people were sort of taught to repeat and record back, that was something that was practiced when I was both an undergraduate and graduate, but I hated it so much that I never went to the language lab. And so therefore don't really feel myself under the strong influence of audio-lingual instruction and that sense, but toward the second half of my period in graduate school, and certainly, when I was a young professor, young faculty member in the mid-90s, there finally to Russian studies, Communicative Language Teaching was coming. And so for the first time, we were emphasizing speaking in a way that played less that place less stress on errors and error correction, and more stress on helping students just to speak. And I would say, I think it's pretty fair to say that Communicative Language Teaching is still pretty much the dominating method in Russian language teaching to this day, even though other methods have long had influence in the teaching of other languages. So the multi-literacies approach, for example, hasn't really taken a deep dive in Russian language instruction yet, it's just beginning. So as always, we're behind say French and Spanish in thinking about the ways we're thinking about language. There are differences, though, there are advantages to be had in language teaching that focuses student attention on grammar and structure, because in Russian, it can be a major barrier when students try to attain higher levels of language proficiency, and are still dealing with what are called fossilized errors. So it can be a huge problem to work with a student who has very, very fluent Russian, but is making case errors that can, for example, can inhibit meaning. So I think in Russian, there's still a wide variety of approaches, some of which are very old, some of which are just beginning to come in that are new. But we constantly faced the challenge of making sure that students have a good sense of the structure of the language, while also being free to express their thoughts in the language. So in teaching language, pedagogy we're constantly talking about issues of error correction and when to focus and when not to focus and when to focus on student production and focusing on form generally, and not certainly steering our junior learning teachers away from the approach that I learned from, which is stopping someone at every error and focusing on every error, because the result of that, of course, can be that someone is terrified even to try to produce a sentence in Russian. So there's, we still have a lot to learn, there's still a lot of approaches that have come into the teaching of Russian but we still, I think, have, there's plenty of room for thinking about other ways of acquiring Russian. And I think the dominating approach still very much is Communicative Language Teaching in Russian, which means a lot of speaking, students are speaking focused. But there are I think, still, there's still a lot of room for learning in various interpretive modes in reading and listening, there's still a lot more we can be thinking about and learning about how students acquire language through reading and through listening.
Claire Darmstadter
Yeah, that is fascinating, I never really considered, I guess how the theories kind of vary depending on the language. Yeah, I think that's really cool. And also I know personally, I had a very grammatical basis to Spanish. And that can be a security blanket because I can just kind of go through the Rolodex in my head of verb endings if I'm confused, but it becomes very mathematical. And so it's sometimes hard to spontaneously speak. So it's always a constant battle for me as well. And I know, if I understand correctly, you work with a Russian flagship program at UW. And it's a little bit different from just like, I guess a typical language major, so can you kind of talk us through how it works?
Karen Evans-Romaine
Absolutely, gladly. So the Russian, all the language flagship programs, are predicated on the idea that — I should back up and say what the language flagship is. So the language flagship is a federally funded program by the National Security Education Program in the Department of Defense. So the idea is to bring undergraduates to a professional level of proficiency or help them attain that professional level of proficiency in languages that are determined to be critical for us national security and economic competitiveness. So that is Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Korean, Persian, and I am missing one. But those are the main languages. The biggest, the ones that have the biggest enrollments are Russian, Arabic and Chinese. Not in that order. I believe it's Chinese, Russian, Arabic in terms of the enrollments, potentially Arabic is even more. So the idea is actually groundbreaking, because studies have shown over the past 25 years, that most undergraduates taking majoring in Russia, not just taking Russia but majoring in Russian attain intermediate-mid Russian on the ACTFL scale by the end of their second year, and they stay there. So they attain intermediate-mid, sort of survival level Russian, being able to ask questions, to answer questions in several sentences, read text related to everyday life, listen to announcements related to everyday life, and write sort of short notes like a note to your roommate and a brief letter to your professor apologizing saying you have to miss class and so forth, but just a few sentences. And that's where they stay through third year Russian and fourth year Russian. I think for many reasons,because of that balance you and I were talking about because there's a lot of grammar to absorb. And that move in Russian because of that is really hard from intermediate to advanced to be able to speak, to narrate, to describe in paragraphs, to tell a story, to tell someone about the rules of your favorite sports game, or to talk about your favorite recipe. Those are all advanced level skills. And they are incredibly difficult for our students to attain. So when I first heard about the language flagship I actually just didn't even think it would be possible for students to attain not only advanced but superior as undergraduates. Our job on campus is to help bring them to the advanced level. And through a combination of intensive coursework, summer study in order to help them get through this program in four years instead of say seven, and a prior study abroad experience, it's usually a summer study abroad in a Russian speaking country. And also on top of that tutoring, mostly non-credit, but then they do one one credit tutoring project that helps them link Russian with whatever their major is. Because the tenet is that the student can attain this level of proficiency being a major in any discipline. And so that's an extra challenge of the flagship program, trying to help say a neurobiology major attain advanced level proficiency in Russian, but then also begin to link their major neurobiology with their study of Russian. So we have Russian across the curriculum tutorial when they're at the advanced level, that helps them work with a specialist in that area and write a brief paper in Russian on some aspect of say neurobiology. And then they go from advanced to superior, not here on campus, but in the study abroad, which takes place at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University in Almaty, Kazakhstan. So those are the components of the program. And it is phenomenal to see that students really are able to attain this, when they have all these affordances, all these interventions and to help them with building paragraphs in Russian, with telling stories in Russian, describing things in Russian and we have a wide variety of Co-curricular activities as well, to help them talk speak in Russian about various things that might be of interest to them. to play games in Russian to watch movies, to have conversations with various people in various different fields in Russian, trying to appeal to a wide variety of students, student majors, student learning styles, student interests, academic and non-academic, in Russian. So that's the basic idea of the program. And it's amazing how successful it is. Most of our students, virtually all of our students who complete the program do attain a superior level of proficiency in Russian, which is just mind-blowing.
Claire Darmstadter
Yeah, that sounds incredible. It sounds a little bit similar to last year, I participated in a residential college program at Michigan. And it’s a little bit similar, where it's like very immersive, and it's like all day long doing Spanish, but it's super helpful. I understand that you also helped with the Wisconsin Language Roadmap, if I understand correctly?
Karen Evans-Romaine
To some extent, although I wasn't really a part of the team. So my knowledge of it is I'm sorry to say limited, but I am an enthusiastic supporter.
Claire Darmstadter
So kind of a more general question related to that. So when I was reading the roadmap, there's kind of a section or throughout, there's kind of rationales for why we should expand language education, because this roadmap is meant not just for scholars who are very supportive of language, but also businesses in schools and outside organizations. You talked a little bit about how the flagship program, it's identifying languages that are pertinent to national security. I know, in the roadmap, there's a lot of undertones of economic advantages. And well, that might be the reality, I think sometimes that can create kind of like a, I don't know, people don't feel great about it. Because it's like, well, you're telling me my language is a threat, you're telling me my language is just money? So I guess what do you think we should use as justification for expanding language education? And do you think out of necessity, we're including these pieces, or perhaps it might be kind of devaluing part of the cultural component?
Karen Evans-Romaine
That's a really, really fantastic question. And I remembered I looked at the list and remembered the language I forgot, which is Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese. So, we all learn languages for a wide variety of reasons. And languages and language study is funded for a wide variety of reasons too. And I think it's important for students to study the language they want to study for the reasons they want to study it. And I think it's absolutely fantastic that the Defense Department has stepped in to fund the study of languages with a desire, with the hope that there will be students who will attain this professional level proficiency and work for the federal government. But the program isn't restricted to that. That is the idea, it’s to create this large pool, knowing that some of them will end up wanting to work for the federal government. It doesn't have to be by any means all of them and our alumni have reflected that variety. We have alumni who are working for the federal government, we have alumni who are working in a wide variety of spheres that are connected with those interests that are listed in the language flagship website. But we also have alumni who are doing Slavic languages literatures, PhD programs, for example, studying Russian literature. And it's exciting to me that this program is just broadening the pool, broadening the number of students who have levels of proficiency that all of us could only have dreamed of when I was a graduate student in Michigan, because my undergraduate profile absolutely represents what's in those studies that I think probably I graduated at intermediate high because I had one study some semester abroad and coursework at Oberlin. And that was, that was the extent of it. So I think it's important to support language. And I wish we lived in a nation where everybody believes that we need to support language from kindergarten all the way up. And so I'm excited to see all federal initiatives that step in to help students learn a language, and it's exciting to see more and more bilingual education and dual immersion programs in public schools around the country where kids can, from very young ages, start to learn Spanish as my niece did in a public school. In Maryland, or, students can learn Chinese or Arabic, starting in school or Russian, it's a really fantastic thing. And to me, the more such programs we have to help students learn whatever language it is they want, for whatever reasons it is they want, the better I think that's really an exciting thing. We want to grow these possibilities. With regard to culture, that actually has become one of the priorities of the language flagship, and I've just come off, I'm just finishing up the last steps of a three year grant, in which we were developing learning cultural learning scenarios, in Russian. And this grant also covered Arabic and Portuguese. And there's a separate grant doing the same kind of thing for Chinese, in which we are helping students deal with potentially difficult situations, challenging situations culturally, in study abroad, or internship abroad or other living abroad situations, like things like sharing food, things that we might not even think about. And of things like sitting with a family at dinner, what the expectations are, when your family,when you're living in a host family, that the expectation is that you're going to sit with them at dinner and engage over a meal, instead of knowing that you've got tons of work, grabbing your food into your room and doing your homework there that that has very different meaning in different cultures. Talking about helping students dealing with different cultural values and expectations in terms of the taking of advice that we as Americans have very different attitudes about giving and receiving advice, that are related to values of individualism and similar, then, in the countries that we'll be sending, that we send our students to study Russian, and that that's something students, especially students at that age, say 20-21, they may have some difficulty working with it when they are surrounded by people at school, at home, maybe even at work, who are giving them advice on all sorts of different topics. So helping students deal with larger cultural differences that may in many cases be unspoken, but coming up with the words, helping them to try to come up with the words to speak their way through these situations. And to understand why this person is giving me advice — I’m 21 — why is someone telling me to put a hat on when it's cold outside? Or why is someone telling me what to wear, when I'm about to go to the theater, I'm a grown up, I can figure that out. Or what expectations are unspoken expectations of me in terms of how I behave in a classroom, at the workplace, who enters a room first, how to respond when a professor enters the room. What are expectations if you're late for class, where it's okay and not okay to be eating and drinking, where it's really really not okay to throw out food because class is starting and your snack time is over. Very subtle thing. So all of these have to do with everyday aspects of culture, that sometimes are talked about and sometimes aren't talked about in the classroom, because sometimes they're difficult to talk about. And so that's to me been a really, really exciting recent project that, that we're just finishing up and I hope that people will enjoy working with these scenarios that are now published both in English and Russian, in classrooms, in tutoring groups with others to try to engage with culture in a broader way. I think all of us in textbook writing are trying to move away from the idea of culture as being these little things you put in a box about Oh, isn't it interesting? This culture that this language that we're studying, they do this, or they do this to celebrate a holiday, to try to take away those boxes, and integrate culture in every aspect of our teaching and learning. As to the choice of languages. I think I, of course, I can't second guess, the funders of studying any language. But I think the idea isn't to monetize a language. My sense is that the idea is to broaden the knowledge of various languages. Because, for example, there are many schools now in Wisconsin, or in many places all over the country, where Spanish may be the only foreign language a kid has the choice to take. And that's wonderful that kids have the possibility of taking Spanish. But what if they want to take Chinese or Arabic, it's exciting to me that these programs are out there to offer those possibilities, both for roadmap programs at the K 12 level and for flagship programs and Project Go programs at the university level. It's just exciting to me that they give students more opportunities when students want to be taking more languages to have more on the menu than just one language to take. I say that saying that I feel that a knowledge of Spanish is incredibly important for anyone living in the US, then it's a source of deep embarrassment for me that I don't know Spanish, I feel like all Americans should. But it's also important to me that students have the opportunity to take a variety of languages, so I only greet with enthusiasm programs that support studying less commonly taught languages. It's an important part of our education, too.
Claire Darmstadter
Yes. And so you mentioned kind of a pinnacle or a key part of that flagship program is that study abroad experience? With COVID, it's been a little bit more difficult. So have you found ways to modify it with online conversations? Has it been scrapped? How is that kind of figuring into your plans and student success?
Karen Evans-Romaine
What a fantastic question. This has been a really, really, really hard year for everybody and for language studies, certainly. So last summer, most of our students take study abroad through the flagship program on a program organized through American Councils for International occasion Education, called the Russian Language and Area Studies Program, that prior study abroad, and so that was converted last summer to entirely online. We're waiting to hear whether they'll be offering it online this coming summer, but we're optimistically hoping that they will. And the flagship program this year, the capstone, the Russian overseas flagship program, the academic year program has been offered entirely online this year. So I am in incredible admiration of American Councils for having been able to offer both the summer and the academic year programs online. It is amazing to me that they've been able to do that. And that linguistically, looking at the results of student entrance and exit tests last summer that students attained tremendous success. All that said, all of us understand that study abroad is really, really, really important and that studying online is a substitute for study abroad that all students understand is a substitute. What they really want is to be studying online. On the other hand, online education in all its facets, provides access to students who may be home with families, may be taking care of younger siblings, or may have other obligations that prevent them from actually going abroad. So like so much in life, it's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, of course, all of us really want our students to be able to study abroad. On the other hand, I am so tremendously grateful to the colleagues who've been able to offer online alternatives to that. Summer intensive programs, both here at UW Madison and at other peer institutions were also entirely online last summer. So of course, it's not what we would want for our students, we do want them to have that full immersion experience that they don't have when they're sitting at home, in their kitchens or their rooms. But it is wonderful that at least that opportunity is there, so we're all crossing fingers that starting in the fall, our students will be able to go abroad again and fully experience every aspect of cultural and linguistic immersion abroad.
Claire Darmstadter
I hope so myself, I have my fingers crossed. So finally, we tell little kids all the time, that's a superpower to speak more than one language. Can you give me one reason, you can answer in English, you can answer in French, in German in Polish, any language or combinations of language you want, why it’s a superpower to speak more than one language.
Karen Evans-Romaine
Знание языка - это вход в другую культуру, это вход в другой мир. Студент, который изучает другой язык открывает для себя совершенно новые возможности, которые он себе даже не представлял, когда он начал думать о том, что будет изучать этот другой язык. Это новый мир. Это новая культура. Это новые возможности. Это, это волшебство. Правда, волшебство. Это магия.
Studying another language is opening the door, opening a window not only into that language, but into an entirely different culture. You're opening a world, a window into entirely new possibilities that you didn't even imagine were possible when you began to study that other language. It is so exciting to be able to enter many different worlds and to be able to see the world through different eyes. So study as many languages as possible and open as many windows as possible. Breathe as much fresh air of many, many different cultures and worlds and languages as you possibly can.
Claire Darmstadter
Yes. Well, thank you so much. A thank you for that translation. I think I picked up on the word culture, but that was about it, so I appreciate the help there. So thank you so much. For all the insight you had to share it This was incredible. And I am so excited for all the students they get to take classes with you because it just sounds like so much fun. And I hope you have a great rest of your semester.
Karen Evans-Romaine
I'm so excited to and I wish you the very very best in this project and in all your endeavors. Thank you so much, Большое спасибо. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful, wonderful day and year. Thank you.
