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Therefore, the elementary stage (years one and two in our exemplary
high school)--for the cognitive and practical reasons discussed above--should
emphasize procedural knowledge, somewhat "at the expense of" factual
knowledge. At the intermediate stage (years three and four in this high school),
however, it becomes both necessary and more possible to rectify this slight
bias. The articulation goal that follows from the above assumptions is that
students who have completed four years of high school Russian (or perhaps
three years and a summer of language immersion) will be able to place into
third-year college Russian.
Further, it is a proposal--to be debated--of this document that a general,
nationalgoal be that by the conclusion of the intermediate stage, whether in
high school or college, the major structural/declarative knowledge of Russian
grammar be in place (see below in the definition of stages for a discussion of
what this knowledge is taken to be and what is meant by "in place").
There are two important consequences of this framework for college
programs. First, colleges and universities need to be encouraged to be flexible
in their programs and placement decisions. We would like to argue for the need
to create compensatory mechanisms in college programs to facilitate higher
placements of incoming students, rather than routinely requiring such students
to begin from the beginning23.
The second implication in the discussion above is that college programs
would also benefit from the framework described here. Although college stu-
dents are generally more mature and are better able to handle the abstractions
of declarative knowledge, it is nevertheless still the case that the discussion of
procedural knowledge applies to them in much the same way. Thus the pro-
posal here is not simply that colleges continue (if this has been their approach)
to focus on the deductive presentation of declarative knowledge and then wave
incoming high school students into a higher level than they might have before.
Rather, we believe that most college learners also learn more effectively in the
long run if their program begins with an elementary course that has a greater
emphasis on procedural knowledge.
Instructional orientation.This aspect of the RLLF derives its support from
principle 3: programs must be learning centered. This may seem as though it
ought to be so obvious as to be trivial. As we set about defining stages,
however, we soon realized that the articulation problem existed for very clear
developmental reasons. That is, while it might appear that high school and
college programs do, independently meet the requirements of this principle, the
boundaries create substantial hurdles for students attempting to negotiate the
23Imagine, for example, a college program which utilizes the one-stem system for verbs in
its first year course. Students who enter this program with a level of proficiency which
supports placement in second year should not be sent into a first year course simply to
learn the one-stem system.
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