Horace G. Lunt

Phonological and Morphological Units in Teaching Russian.

It is easy to speak ones native language. A speaker is perhaps aware on occasion of making choices among words or alternate phrases-i.e., of consciously selecting certain lexical or syntactical units-but the morphology and phonetics seem to flow out, as it were, by themselves. Nonetheless, no serious student of language denies that there are morphological and phonological units which every speaker manipulates. As teachers of a foreign language, we want our students to achieve, or closely approximate, a nativelike subconscious and effortless production of speech in the new language. Now, it has been shown that a student-teacher team, with enough time, can come close to this goal by endless repetition of meaningful but unanalyzed utterances, as a child seems to learn his first language. But experience has also shown that adult students learn more quickly and with more pleasure if the language is presented as systematic combinations of recognizable units on various levels of abstraction. Let us agree, then, that speaking is to be viewed as a dynamic process, where the speaker has at his disposal, first, certain meaningful units (phonological, morphological, syntactical, lexical) and, second, rules for combining them to create evernew utterances. With these considerations in mind, I should like to offer some suggestions as to what units are particularly useful in teaching Russian.

The Beginning of Written Slavic

The lucid account of the Moravian mission of Constantine-Cyril and Methodius that Professor Dvornik has given is a persuasive and up-todate statement of widely accepted views. Yet scarcely a single specialist would be willing to agree unhesitatingly with all the details even in such a brief resume of the quarter-century of relations between the emerging Slavic nations and their neighbors. Indeed, some, as his footnotes suggest, might take exception to certain of his major points. The difficulty lies in our historical sources-in their paucity, their unclear allusions, their omissions, and, worst of all, their contradictions. First of all, so little of the nlinth-century material has survived that we are dependent on the views written decades or even centuries after the events. Then, even the contemporary writings have come down to us in modified forin, owing to varying amounts of recopying and editing, with inevitable distortions, omissions, reinterpretations, and interpolations. The two principal sources are the Lives of Cyril and Methodius, composed originally in Old Church Slavonic.1 The Vita Constantini (VC) was very likely written by Methodius. Only about a third (i.e., about eleven pages of this format) is devoted to the Moravian mission, the rest chronicling Con-stantines earlier missions to the Saracens and Khazars, and in particular his theological debates with various opponents. The Vita Methodii (VM) must have been wvritten immediately after the death of Methodius (885), for it makes no mention of the sudden dispersal of his followers and the termination of their work in Moravia. It is shorter (about ten pages of this format) and includes a florid thireepage introduction recounting the history of chosen men from the Creation down to the Church Councils. The biography itself is stylistically much simpler than that of VC, and there seems to be an assumption that the reader is acquainted with VC, for only the most necessary