The Trusty Servant May 2020 Issue 129 | Page 14

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 In 1988, O level was superseded by GCSE; the emphasis shifted from syntactical and lexical accuracy to oral/aural communication.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