These two writers - a former associate professor of the Russian Teaching Department at the Russian University of Peoples' Friendship (RUDN) and a professor and holder of several academic prizes - were pleased to learn about President Vladimir Putin's efforts to contribute to the preservation of the Russian language among the Russian diasporas throughout the world. Indeed, there is a pressing need for it, because Russian, a language admired and loved by many across the world, is seriously impaired today. Its geographic base is shrinking. Even in Israel, with over 1 million Russian speakers, less than 10 percent of their children study Russian.

In other states, the situation is even worse. At this rate, only one percent of children of Russian speaking parents will speak Russian, which will remain a living language within a narrow circle of emigrant intelligentsia only, as was the case after the 1917 Revolution.

There are objective factors: one is the ongoing spread of English as a language of business communication in the world. But there are also subjective factors. Preventing and eliminating their negative effects only depends on those who hold dear the Russian language and Russian culture. And this is where serious problems arise.

Ten months have passed since Putin's speech (on National Unity Day, November 4, 2006) and eight months since he issued his decree. Less than four months remain till the end of the Year of Russian. State and government officials are sending in upbeat reports on the successful implementation of the programs that they developed. Conferences and meetings devoted to the Year of Russian have been held in Berlin, Helsinki, and Berne, with almost 100 major events planned in all.

Looking at this, one could walk away with the impression that now is not 2007, but a pre-perestroika era. For 70 years [during the Soviet era], the underlying principle of any planning was spending a given sum of money within a given amount of time. No one bothered to ask crucial questions (for example, how many new Russian speakers will appear in a certain country; how many children will start learning Russian the following year, and so on). Bureaucrats had no need for such questions: they reported on their "successes" in terms of the money spent.

True, today's programs and reports contain de rigueur formulas about the need to target children of Russian speaking emigrants in CIS and non-CIS countries. But they say nothing about the outstanding problems or ways of addressing them, while the "Russian Language" State Federal Program sets an unrealistically long time frame on its own implementation. Meanwhile, the only key to whether Russian will remain a living language outside of Russia are today's children.

None of the documents or proceedings of those forums, seminars, or conferences express any concern over the fact that many people who emigrated from Russia are reluctant to teach their children Russian on the excuse that Russian is an "ideologically wrong" language. There are no plans to conduct any public awareness campaigns, among other things, to separate out ideology and language or to counter the insidious influence of diaspora organizations, not least those based in Russia.

Many teachers who have had experience of teaching in Russia are trying to teach children living abroad as though they were native speakers of Russian. However, these children speak the language of their host country [oftentimes the country where they were born], whereas Russian has become a foreign language to them.

The outcome of such teaching practices is predictable: children simply do not study the language. Imagine: a child does not know basic, simple words, while he is forced to study conjugations, cases and other such things. That is the surest way of discouraging them from studying any language. Russian is being rejected. In the best case scenario, schoolchildren are "taught to the test," which isn't real learning. After such "learning," they even forget the alphabet. Furthermore, no provisions are made for organizing advanced training programs for teachers of Russian.

In the past half a century, effective methods of teaching Russian to foreigners have been developed in the country, known as the methodology of Teaching Russian as a Foreign Language (TRFL). To date, it is successfully used to teach foreign students in Russia. In the past six years, it has been adapted to teaching children. Nevertheless, the Year of the Russian Language program does not even mention the pressing need of developing a TRFL theory. Incidentally, earlier this year, the Russky yazyk za rubezhom (Russian Language Abroad) journal rejected a proposal to start a discussion on TRFL fundamentals. Why are we not surprised? Remember the time when the monopoly on the truth prevented the spread of the ideas of Dr. V. M. Shcherba (1880-1944), an outstanding methodologist and teacher of Russian. Today, there is not even a standard textbook on TRFL methodology.

Yet another problem that the aforementioned forums and conferences have conveniently ignored is the fact that textbooks for Russian schools (i.e., schools in Russia) are almost useless for children of people who emigrated from Russia or for foreigners (i.e., non-native speakers of Russian). Nevertheless, publishers keep producing and sending such textbooks abroad in large numbers. In Russia, a child goes to school with an active vocabulary of 5,000 to 6,000 words, whereas "in emigration," a child has a vocabulary of just 300 to 400 words, has no idea about Russian as an organized system and has probably never seen Cyrillic characters before.

We were confronted with the loss of Russian as a problem seven years ago, when we started a program of teaching children of Russian speaking immigrants in Israel. There were no useful TRFL textbooks, albeit there were textbooks called exactly that - "TRFL." We had to adapt "adult" methodology to children, bringing out three TRFL textbooks that we wrote and paid for out of our own pocket (one for preschoolers, a basic course, and a course for middle school).

According to reports and comments from a large number of schools, private teachers, linguists, specialists, and parents in Israel, Europe, the United States, and Canada, teaching based on these textbooks has produced good results. CIS citizens are also seeking our help. In response to that need, we organized a series of seminars for teachers, including via the Internet. Later this year, we are planning to conduct a retraining and refresher training course for teachers of Russian in Britain. We have also launched a program that aims at preserving Russian among children whose parents emigrated from Russia. It would be a good idea to pool efforts in this area. But our initiatives have generally been ignored by Russian government officials and publishers.

By Nina Vlasova Kurits and Sergei Kurits