American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

Listen, Read, Look, then Speak! by O. Rudenko-Morgun; T. VasilyevaReview by: Kevin J. McKennaThe Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Winter, 1992), p. 518Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/309020 .

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518 Slavic and East European Journal

shortcomings mentioned above. It is to be hoped that further work will be organized and presented in a more focused manner, and that more attention will be devoted to textual accuracy.

Ronelle Alexander, University of California, Berkeley

O. Rudenko-Morgun, T. Vasilyeva. Listen, Read, Look, then Speak ! Russky Yazyk Publish- ers, 1990. 189 pp.

This short course for first-year students consists of a small textbook, two audio cassettes, and a series of game supplements. The text itself is divided into five lessons: "Let's Get Ac- quainted," "How Much is the Kitten?" "What's in the Parcel?" "Let's Go to the Stadium," and "When and Where Do We Meet?" Each of the lessons consists of a series of short readings and dialogues which are accompanied by exercises (with keys) at the end of the book. The audio materials contain recordings of dialogs and readings used throughout the textbook. Finally, the game supplements at the end of the book consist of cutout drawings to be used for purposes of creating situational dialogs.

While these dialogs and conversations may prove of some limited interest to beginning college students, much of the material seems keyed more to the junior high school/high school level. In addition, the lack of accompanying grammar materials considerably limits the feasibil- ity of using this textbook. The quality of the audio format is high, but here too the content level does not really add anything new or superior to a number of our existing first-year Russian textbooks. The game supplements may ultimately insult our students' intelligence as they seem keyed more to an early-adolescent age than to that of college students.

In the recent past, these materials might have come more highly recommended owing to the limited number of first-rate textbooks at the beginning Russian levels. Fortunately, however, our profession is witnessing an increase in the availability and quality of first and seconnd-year textbooks and materials. For this reason, I cannot recommend an adolescent-level textbook that does not really add anything valuable or new to the current market.

Kevin J. McKenna, University of Vermont

Leonard A. Polakiewicz. Supplemental Materials for First Year Polish. Columbus: Slavica, 1991. lxii, 212 pp., $16.95 (paper).

Those of us who use Oscar Swan's First Year Polish (FYP, 1983 edition) have long felt an acute need for supplementary material which would provide a greater variety of meaningful exer- cises, more interesting texts, cultural information on Poland and Polish daily life, and ways of teaching Polish more oriented towards developing proficiency and communicative skills. Sup- plemental Materials for First Year Polish (SM) is an attempt to fill this need. The book consists of a short introduction to the alphabet and phonetics (ix-xxii), with diagrams and a good collection of minimal pairs, followed by a fairly long section (xxiii-liv) on Polish intonation based on S. Puppel, J. Nawrocka-Fisiak, H. Krassowska, A Handbook of Polish Pronuncia- tion for English Learners (Warsaw, 1977), apparently for reference. There is an index to recordings available at the Univeristy of Minnesota (of limited use to others). The rest of the book consists of thirty lessons (1-184) modelled on FYP and a Polish-English glossary com- piled from the various lists in the lessons.

This content downloaded from 195.34.78.42 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 15:41:00 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions