Crossing the Great Divide

Kyra Janssen found out that teaching English involved more than just language lessons when she traveled as a Fulbright Scholar to the Ukrainian city of Kharkov.

Kharkov was an important center of technological research and industrial production in the Soviet period. Even today there are 22 institutions of higher learning in the city, but the industrial base has all but disappeared and debilitating unemployment and underemployment are endemic, especially among the ranks of the highly skilled professionals.
Kharkov State Polytechnic University, Ukraine’s counterpart to Boston’s MIT, offers "specialties" in "Economic Cybernetics" (Information Systems), Computer Science, and other technical fields that require English language competence. In order to serve these particular needs, a department of Foreign Language for Specific Purposes (FLSP) was established in March 1999. The University also invited its first American Fulbright Scholar (the author) to spend the academic year 1999-2000 in Kharkov and assigned her to work with the fledgling department.

Historically, students and faculty at Kharkov Polytechnic have had little opportunity for person-to-person contact with native speakers of English. While most have studied English from British textbooks and tape cassettes, few have had any relationship with an American before. Dr. Badan, (head of the FLSP department) and the author realized that ten months working closely together as professional colleagues, along with a team of Ukrainian teachers eager for contact with a fellow educator from the West, offered a unique laboratory for observation and analysis of cross cultural interaction. Even though the core technical language that constitutes the formal curriculum for these students is pretty cut and dried, the sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic aspects of English in a cross-cultural setting tend to be very culture bound. Information and interactions based on idiomatic expressions, politeness routines and other pragmatics, even body language, are readily subject to misunderstanding, often resulting in awkward and confusing, sometimes even traumatic (but more often bemusing) experiences. We agreed early on that they would attempt to document and analyze some of these situations and some of our observations and interpretations follow:

KJ: There are very basic differences in the educational systems and philosophies of our two countries. I was aware, from my previous experience in the Czech Republic, of the lock step nature of the curriculum at a post Soviet university; the inflexible year to year sequence of courses in any given major. But I hadn’t realized that developing a relevant curriculum in a new specialty area requires step-by-step approval by the very bureaucratic National Ministry of Education for everything from textbooks used to number of hours per course to numbers of students to be admitted to the program. So, when I arrived with some innovative suggestions for alternative teaching methods using non-standard teaching materials there was little opportunity to try them, and my offers to introduce elective courses could not be worked into the schedule.
AB: Speaking of the Ukrainian educational system, one shouldn’t overlook the fact that it is deeply rooted in the European, or more narrowly, German tradition of highly philosophical and theoretical methods. We start with models and then attach facts and realia to them. Simply put, students in Ukraine are used to acquiring the necessary knowledge in class and then to brush up on their notes at home. They expect a teacher to guide them through the labyrinths of English grammar rather than to use the "problem solving" approach to get to the core of the unknown themselves.

KJ: Students and teachers in the Ukraine are most comfortable with the deductive approach to learning, where rules are introduced initially, with practical applications introduced later. This differs from the language learning methodology that is currently favored in the US that builds from examples of authentic usage toward discovery of the theoretical underpinnings. Whereas the traditional European, and certainly the Soviet, teaching style relied heavily on memorization and regurgitation of teacher generated information, the buzz words in the West have been, for some time, "integrated skills", and "communicative competence", rather than formulaic ingestion of the structural and phonetic aspects of the language.
AB: Yes, the teachers in our department are aware of these discrepancies, and several would like to have greater flexibility to try new approaches, but there are some practical matters that must be considered. The environment in which we work is very restricted. The availability of teaching resources is closely tied to budget constraints. Even if there were American publishers’ reps and better distribution channels bringing more up-to-date textbooks and supplementary materials into Ukraine, our limited departmental funds would be inadequate to buy even single copies of new materials. Also, most students are not able to afford to buy their own textbooks, but must rely on shared photocopies of the teacher’s copy of the basic text for each course. As for other sources of reference materials for any sort of independent research, or even pleasure reading, the collections in English at both the main library on the campus and the city public library are pathetically outdated.
Another common practice among American teachers of preparing handouts designed for the specific needs of a class is not practical for us because of the expense of making copies. Few departments have their own copy machines, and those that do restrict their use to important documents in very small quantities, since a package of copier quality paper is a precious commodity. Needless to say, personal computers are a rarity for anyone subsisting on a teacher’s salary.

KJ: That brings up two other areas of cultural and pedagogical dissonance that we have discovered. One is the issue of homework and the other is that of attendance in class. I was quite surprised to find out that although the students were presumably brushing up at home on the lecture material presented in class, they were not given explicit assignments to be completed outside of class in order to practice any new material or reinforce their accumulated skills and knowledge. In the U.S. regular homework assignments are part and parcel of all academic classes.
AB: Again, we have a mixture of cultural traditions and economic realities. Most of our students have to work to supplement their meager stipends, and often to support their families as well. For us to require that specific homework assignments be completed within strict time deadlines is not realistic, although we do give students a body of study material that is to be completed by the end of semester in preparation for the final examinations. But since we know that the key to effective language learning is to use it, in all four skill areas, not just to drill, memorize, rewrite or even practice it in isolation, the issue of homework is really less important than the other problem you identified, that of erratic attendance.

KJ: Exactly! This is a practice that I find disconcerting. In every US institution I have taught, including university level Intensive English Programs and at the community college level, one of the requirements for passing a course, and often a significant determinant of the final grade received, is attendance at a certain percentage of the class sessions. Students are notified, usually in writing, at either the first or second class meeting, of this and other course requirements. I have found no such expectation, either here and or in the Czech Republic. Rather there seem to be some "shadow scholars", who are merely names on the roster, but who can apparently get credit for the course if they pass their final examination at the end of the year. And then this practice raises another thorny issue, that of testing, where there seems to be a wide cultural disparity between the American approach and the still prevalent Soviet system.
AB: Again, the traditional system of oral examinations is deeply rooted and not likely to be transformed very quickly. Bear in mind that in scientific and mathematical disciplines, the graduates of Ukrainian and Russian universities have excelled internationally over the years, so maybe there is a place for this approach. Nevertheless we are gradually making adjustments in the arena of language instruction and assessment in the direction of greater attention to a variety of learning modalities. This topic also brings up another area where we have noticed some differences in attitudes and expectations. It has to do with the relationship between students and teachers. There are several ways in which this relationship seems to differ in our respective cultures. There is a wide gap between the Ukrainian student and the teacher in the formal classroom setting, while at the same time there is an emotional bonding that takes place between students and "their" teachers over time that often leaves the student feeling abandoned when the instructional relationship ends.

KJ: Absolutely! I was quite flabbergasted when I walked into my first classroom and all students scrambled to stand up and then waited respectfully until I assured them it was quite all right for them to remain seated. I’m sure my bemusement was quite evident in my facial expressions and other body language! Also the way students relate very deferentially to faculty members when they come to the department office with a question or a problem is in sharp contract to the self-assured, sometimes even contentious, manner in which American students feel entitled to approach their instructors. I was very touched by the protestations of my first semester classes when they learned that I would not be teaching them in the second semester. I was able to respond by starting a weekly informal conversation group, to which any student from the department could come, to try to sustain the relationship with those who were truly interested. But even this concept, akin to a "brown bag lunch" on American campuses, has been quite revolutionary.
AB: Although our small department is faced with many challenges trying to convince the bureaucracy of the value of our progressive mission, this team of dedicated teachers is convinced that we have a dual responsibility to our students. We must not only teach them the essential jargon that they will need as they pursue careers in the modern technological arena, but we must also expose them to the sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic nuances of the English language. There are many culturally determined attitudes, behaviors and value systems that are essential elements of their future world, the global village. The presence of an energetic, enthusiastic American has imbued our faculty with a refreshing "can do" spirit and helped students to distinguish between the America of MTV and fast cars and the reality of earnest effort and taking responsibility for one’s own educational progress. Together we have been reflecting on the ways that we are both alike and different, and in fact we are both transforming our respective cultures, as well as being transformed by each others cultures, as we interact with each other in this shared educational experience.

KJ: I note my growing realization of how ethnocentric we Americans tend to be, and how living in a foreign country sharpens one’s awareness of "Who Am I?" (Where have I come from, why do I behave the way I do, where am I going, and, as a teacher, how can I be most effective?) It’s tempting to think one is "doing good" for others who have missed out on learning the "right" way to do things, yet with exposure to differences there evolves a mutual adjustment rather than a conversion.

Dr. Antonina Badan, has a Ph.D. in Linguistics, with a particular research interest in cross-cultural communication, augmented by three months of postdoctoral study in Michigan 1997. The author holds a MA in TEFL, is a member of the Adjunct Faculty in the ESL Department at Santa Rosa Junior College in California and taught at a Pedagogical Faculty in the Czech Republic from 1993-96.