No.129
foreign trips. I reluctantly agreed:
going abroad out of term-time was
novel but proved essential. In 1988,
O level was superseded by GCSE;
the emphasis shifted from syntactical
and lexical accuracy to oral/aural
communication. We were now to cope
with ‘authentic contexts’: instead
of accurately translating ‘She put
her socks into the wrong drawer’,
candidates had to respond to ‘real
life situations’, such as shopping
or dealing with a minor medical
emergency. GCSE helped increase the
fluency of the spoken language at the
expense of grammatical accuracy.
Thus, in the interests of preparing
for the new reading and listening
comprehension papers, role-plays
and structured conversation tests,
Wykehamists studying Russian
trekked east to the Soviet Union.
The countries of western European
languages were easily accessible: they
were a short distance away, had no
travel restrictions and required no
visas. The Russia trip was a grand
undertaking. Once or twice we stayed
at the Gostinitsa Ukraina, one of the
Stalinist ‘Christmas Tree’ towers on
the Moscow River. The Ukraina is
now a Radisson five-star hotel; the
massive bronze and sombre stone
of the lobby and dining-room are
probably gone.
After a while, A level changed:
the literature paper became
undemanding, although essays
had to be written in the target
language rather than English; factual
Nicholas Fennell at the
Minack Theatre with John Surry
The Trusty Servant
knowledge about demography,
sociology and geography became more
important than study of the classical
set-texts. Detailed critical analysis and
textual commentaries were phased
out. Furthermore, graded, non-literary
project work was introduced and the
number of set texts was drastically
reduced.
Shortly after 2008, we abandoned
A level for Cambridge Pre-U. The
new exam reintroduced grammatical
testing and included a reasonably
demanding literature paper, but not,
alas, old-fashioned, rigorous proses
and unseens. Today Cambridge
Pre-U is being phased out and a
more difficult A level is taking its
place. I was part of an Ofqual group
scrutinising the proposed new GCSE
and A-level papers. They demand
a knowledge of so many facts about
the country of the language being
examined that I am relieved no longer
to be teaching.
Since the 1988 GCSE revolution,
lessons have been conducted in the
target language; the old grammar-
translation days are gone forever. Nic
Sollohub (see AHT’s article) managed
to bridge the gap between the old
and new methods. A pioneer of the
Nuffield Russian Course, his lessons
were primarily audio-visual, based
in the language lab: pupils learnt by
repetition grammatical structures
and vocabulary from picture-based
texts set in the Soviet Union. The
Nuffield oral-aural exercises and the
advanced readers were so stimulating
and ingenious that I used them
throughout my teaching career. Roger
Custance (Co Ro, 69-06; College
Archivist) kept a copy for posterity of
part of one of the Count’s end-of-term
tests. Translate into Russian:
1. Seriozha and his little friends are
in the zoo.
2. “Thank you very much!” he said
to the nice girl.
3. He covered it with a large white
handkerchief.
14
Eventually Russian trips happened
yearly and included Leningrad/
St Petersburg, where we went on a
memorable excursion to the infamous
Kresty Prison, in which Anna
Akhmatova’s son, Lev Gumilyov,
was jailed. In December 1991, we
were back in Moscow and saw the
Hammer and Sickle flag flying in its
last week on the Kremlin battlements.
On a couple of occasions, we travelled
with a Westminster School group
led by Robin Aizlewood (B, 67-72),
who later became director of SEES.
We went on a joint expedition with
Rugby School to the diamond-
mining town of Mirny in Yakutia.
We were accommodated in houses
on stilts driven into the permafrost
and attended a ceremony at which a
shaman offered us fermented mare’s
milk. We were so far east that on our
flight back to Moscow we arrived in
the dark, having taken off at dawn.
In the end, I took only post-GCSE
Russianists. The boys stayed in
host families and, after one-to-one
language tuition or in small groups,
we met up in the evenings for cultural
activities. The first of such trips was
to St Petersburg, where we frequented
the Dostoyevsky Bar with its trendy
sofas, easy chairs and small library,
and its watered-down cocktails,
one of which was billed as ‘Crime
and Punishment—our crime, your
punishment’. One year we stayed in
the central tower of Moscow State
University, another of the Stalinist
Christmas Trees, in tiny rooms that
hadn’t been refurbished or cleaned
for over fifty years. We also started
going to Odessa, but on account of
the Russo-Ukrainian War had to
revert to Russia.
Did our trips better equip our boys
to deal with the terrors of language
in a meaningful context? Probably
not, but the exotic appeal of our
subject was enhanced. What made a
real difference to Russian studies was
the Amstrad computer. Introduced