Two myths about teaching Kazakh
Culture and History, Kazakhstan5 Comments
Published with an approval from author sagymengl.
An article that has recently appeared on Azattyq makes a number of debatable claims.
The first is that “in order to learn Kazakh, one should know Russian.” This is difficult to sustain. From my own teaching experience, I know that even if learners don’t know Russian, they can acquire the Cyrillic alphabet in a short period of time. The alphabet is the only element that Kazakh and Russian have in common. Unlike Russian, Kazakh is an agglutinative language that is based on sound harmony and on adding suffixes to the roots of words. Moreover, with the exception of a few Russian loanwords, Kazakh derives most of its vocabulary from ancient Turkic, Arabic and Persian.
Second, the article claims that it is difficult to learn Kazakh because there is no methodology of teaching Kazakh. It seems that many people adhere to this opinion, but I think that many linguists and teachers of Kazakh would disagree. Especially because this opinion appears to be an implicit criticism of Kazakh teachers. What is a methodology of teaching? It is a set of techniques that teachers apply in their teaching. It is not some kind of super-theory that a ministry of education should provide. After all, the methods that have been proposed over the years (the grammar-translation method, the direct method, the audio-lingual method, the communicative method) are purely theoretical.
In practice, good teachers (and most Kazakh teachers are good) integrate a variety of techniques in their lessons, because their purpose is to improve all 4 language skills: reading, writing, comprehension and speaking. What Kazakh teachers need is not an abstract methodology, but more resources. They need professionally made books and dictionaries, and training seminars where they can exchange their teaching experiences. Internet forums would be very helpful, too, except that most Kazakh teachers don’t have access to the internet.
I am curious to hear what my readers think about these issues.
To read this post in Kazakh, click here.
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I totally agree. On point one, I get confused reading Kazakh because of knowing Russian. In Russian there’s one y letter pronounced ‘oo’. But in Kazakh there are 3 y-like letters and I want to pronounce them all ‘oo’ even though they have different sounds.
On point two language learning is language learning. Kazakh can and is taught by a variety of methodologies just like every other language on the planet. There’s no specific methodology for each individual language. Kazakh is taught in Berlitz schools, taught by immersion, by grammar first, teacher centric methods.
I wish I could read the original article because it sounds like it is looking for excuses why not every single person in Kazakhstan speaks Kazakh fluently.
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sagym Reply:
December 28th, 2009 at 9:50 pm
Thank you for the comment. To read the original article in Russian,just click on the link at the beginning of this post.
I agree that the article is looking for excuses, but I think it is important to note that these excuses are common.
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KZBlog Reply:
December 29th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
@sagym, Oh, I assumed the original would be in Kazakh since it’s on Azzatyq
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I met and know many kazakh language teachers, they are bright, and use good, modern techniques.
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As an American who’s studied Kazakh, both in Kazakhstan and in the U.S., I’d actually disagree with what sagymengl says. I can’t imagine how I’d study Kazakh without Russian (well, I can, because I tried it my first year of studying Kazakh, and it did not go well). First, there are many more than “a few” Russian loanwords. Russian is used constantly in Kazakh conversations. Whether these are ‘official’ loanwords, or Russian words that people use instead of the real Kazakh word, there is no doubt that learning “pure Kazakh” will leave you lost in many modern conversations. Second, as everyone knows, a lot of people in Kazakhstan, including some Kazakhs, only speak Russian. If one of the goals of learning Kazakh is to enable you to live/work/communicate in Kazakhstan, you could not fully achieve that goal without knowing Russian.
Second, I’m understanding ‘methodologies’ in this case to mean instructional materials. Currently, what materials there are to study Kazakh are in Russian. The one notable exception is the Peace Corps instruction book, which is getting better and better with each new edition. Unfortunately this book isn’t really used, as far as I know, outside the Peace Corps itself. Sagymengl is right to say that more books and dictionaries are needed, but is incorrect to separate this serious lack of materials from the quality of Kazakh language instruction for foreigners. Even good teachers have trouble coming up with new materials consistently, especially for foreign languages. Teachers of other regional languages, like Uzbek, Uyghur, Tibetan, or Mongolian, can plan most of the class around a book, and then spend their energies on those extra activities which help students to learn the language more than they could from the textbook alone. Most Kazakh teachers, on the other hand, have to spend all their time creating basic materials that are already covered for the other languages by their respective textbooks. The Kazakh teachers don’t necessarily have time to develop as comprehensive a curriculum as other language teachers, since they have to basically write a textbook chapter for every class. This problem is of course solved if the foreign students can read Russian, because then several textbooks can be used (such as Казахский язык для всех, my personal favorite for an introductory level). Until a good English language textbook exists, or until the Peace Corps book is revamped and marketed for use among the general public, Kazakh classes taught to students who don’t know Russian will inevitably be worse because of the extra strain on the teacher to consistently self-produce English-language material. That’s not a criticism of Kazakh teachers - the same holds true for anyone in such a difficult pedagogical circumstance.
Case in point - I took an intermediate Kazakh class a few years ago at a U.S. university. Another student in the class had learned Kazakh in Xinjiang, and didn’t know any Russian. He did learn to read the Cyrillic alphabet quickly, but he was constantly complaining about the numerous Russian words used by our Kazakhstani teacher in her Kazakh speech (and she was a ‘нағыз’ Kazakh who had lived most of her life in an aul, not someone from Almaty). He also got to know several of the the Kazakhs studying at the university. At the end of the year, he started to learn Russian, because he had realized (in his words) that to work with Kazakhs from Kazakhstan or materials from Kazakhstan, knowing Russian was a requirement.
Who knows, this may change in the future. But for the time being, as a foreigner who’s studied Kazakh both before and after I learned Russian, I have agree with Anna Genina - only try it if you already know some Russian.
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