L. V. Shcherba: a ‘new slant’ on modern foreign languages in the school curriculum?

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I offer a critical reflection on the thesis of the general educational value of foreign languages developed by Russian linguist Lev Vladimirovich Shcherba. I do so against the background of current debates on the positioning of foreign languages in the school curriculum in the United Kingdom (UK). I argue that Shcherba's thesis, which was developed almost a century ago, retains its currency and can make an important contribution to the on-going discussion on the value of foreign languages in UK schools. The paper outlines Shcherba's scholarly explorations in general linguistics which underpin his arguments in favour of the inclusion of foreign languages in the basic school curriculum. The conception of language as a system immanently positioned in social experience assigns the foundational role to language in the literacy project. The conscious analytic processing of language phenomena is viewed as an essential pre-condition of literacy, and foreign languages are shown to be instrumental in developing such an analytic capacity of mind. Shcherba's argumentation reflects a comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach, both to foreign language education and to curriculum matters, and merits the attention of language practitioners, educationalists and policy-makers alike.

KEYWORDS:

• School curriculum
• modern foreign languages
• literacy
• Shcherba

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the reviewers for their constructive comments on an earlier draft of this article and Dr Georgina Barker for verifying and editing my translation of Shcherba's text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

*This is an abridged text. The original article was published in the journal Sovetskaya Pedagogika [Soviet Pedagogy] 1942, nos. 5–6. This translation is based on the article re-print in a 1974-volume of Shcherba's texts by the publishing house Nauka, Leningrad. [Л. В. Щерба. 1974. Общеобразовательное значение иностранных языков и место их в системе школьных предметов. Редакторы Л. Р. Зиндер и М. И. Матусевич «Языковая система и речевая деятельность», pp. 344–365. Издательство «Наука», Ленинград].

TN, translator's note. Translator's endnotes are indicated by superscript letters, while Shcherba's footnotes in the text are indicated by numbers, as they appear in the Russian text.

¹ However, certain ‘Introductory courses’, ‘Propaedeutic courses’, etc., are similar to school subjects.

² I would like to emphasise here that this is not a matter of terminology, as many believe, but a matter of general education: in order to translate content one does not understand, one has to be an exceptionally erudite philologist; I cannot develop this point further here due to limitations of space.

³ I say ‘fortunate’ because this was a language that everyone more or less understood. Any difficulty in understanding the language most likely would have been caused by the vague content of the literary works written in it. Besides, it was precisely this interaction of the two elements – Russian and the culturally refined (for its time) Old Church Slavonic – to which our modern Russian language owes its richness and flexibility. Later on, a third element – Western European – was added to these two.

⁴ It is of practical utility only for philologists, historians, philosophers and lawyers (one cannot seriously claim practical significance for Latin in medicine or in natural sciences)

⁵ Reality is not as simple as this: classical education can bring up genuine social activists, progressive and revolutionary minds and, conversely, education based on natural and technical sciences can frequently cultivate self-interested, anti-social elements. There can be found many instances of each, from both the recent and the distant past.

⁶ I should emphasise that this concerns ‘exact’ translations and, moreover, that the notion of ‘exactness’ itself is not as simple as it may seem at first glance: it is not synonymous with either literal or literary translation. However, further elaboration on this matter would lead me too far off course.

⁷ When I call Latin ‘impractical’, I mean this in a very narrow sense, i.e. that no one these days speaks or writes in Latin. However, it goes without saying that Latin, as the foundation of modern European culture, cannot be useless to us; without Latin we cannot understand our modern languages and their historical evolution because they are all saturated with Latin (and this includes Russian). Scientific language, and especially specialist terminology, cannot be clearly comprehended without knowledge of Latin. This is particularly important for Russian-speakers because our everyday language has a relatively smaller number of Latin-based words than other Western-European languages do. Greek would be of historical value for us Russians, as it notably and beneficially impacted on the shaping of our literary language via Old Church Slavonic, but its learning on a mass scale would be problematic and this matter should be left to specialists in Russian philology.

⁸ I say ‘on this account’ because on many other accounts direct methodology developed a number of sound and valuable approaches.

⁹ This, of course, does not imply that Russian should dominate foreign-language lessons: pupils should hear accurate foreign speech from the teacher as much as possible.

¹⁰ I would also like school graduates to perceive mathematics as a means of reflecting reality in its quantitative interconnections, but it seems that this would be the task of higher educational institutions and that it is not possible to fully comprehend the genuine meaning of mathematics in secondary school.

1. The Education Law of 1912 provided for a system of higher elementary education, which was designed to be a further level of elementary education to follow primary elementary education.

2. Gymnasium [Russian Гимназия] was a type of upper secondary school in pre-revolutionary Russia, roughly equivalent to British grammar school.

3. Prostakova is a character from an eighteenth-century farce by Denis Fonvizin The Minor. She is an ignorant landowner. She ridicules learning and is denying the value of the science of geography. She states that it is not for noblemen to learn geography as it is the cab-driver's job to deliver her to the right location. Her phrase извозчики на что [what are cab-drivers for?] has become a popular metaphoric expression in Russian.

4. The notion of народная школа, commonly translated into English as ‘public school’ or ‘peasant school’, refers to the type of elementary schools which were not part of general educational provision in Imperial Russia. These schools were established in smaller towns and the countryside in order to provide education to the masses, and occasionally to specific groups of children of workers or peasants. These schools were self-administered by the teachers or local organisers. One instance of such school is Lev Tolstoy's school for the children of peasants in Yasnaya Polyana.

5. ‘Nizhny Novgorod French’ is a phraseological expression meaning ‘a patchwork of broken French and broken Russian’. The expression was coined by a Russian poet Griboyedov in his play Woe from Wit, where the main character, Chatsky, inquires: Oh, by the way, Is there still a tendency today At meetings, public gatherings, on stage To mix the Nizhny Novgorod dialect with French?

6. Volapük, or ‘World Language’, is a constructed language created in 1879 by Johann Martin Schleyer, a priest from Baden, Germany, and was intended as a language of international communication. In this context, the term Volapük is used in the meaning of ‘gobbledygook’ or ‘gibberish’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Olga Campbell-Thomson

Olga Campbell-Thomson is an affiliate faculty member at the University of Glasgow, teaching language and research skills courses at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures and Glasgow International College.