How good are MOOCs for learning a foreign language?

juillet
Sat, 06 Dec 2014 07:17:27 +0000

I think this question is just like how well do Rosetta Stone or similar programs work. It depends on your personal learning style, your acumen for languages, and how much effort you put into them.

If you want to learn Russian to work in central Asia, that means you mostly need to work on speaking and listening (as opposed to reading and writing, although you’ll need that too). I don’t think that a MOOC is going to offer you the opportunity to develop those skills. You won’t be in class to hear the teacher’s pronunciation; there will be no one to correct you when you mess up; there are no other students to practice speaking skills with. Basically a MOOC will probably help you some with writing and reading if you are diligent, but not speaking and certainly not the listening part.

Russian is a critical language, though, so a lot of language scholarships will help you. The [Critical Language Scholarship](Languages List - Critical Language Scholarship Program) will fund a summer abroad taking an intensive language program in Russian; the caveat is that you have to be “intermediate” before you can get the scholarship (which I assume is probably one year of Russian under the belt). CLS says that their scholars usually get the equivalent of a year of study in just one summer. There is also the [Boren Scholarships](https://www.borenawards.org/boren_scholarship/preferences.html); normally they only fund academic year study, but they have a special initiative to fund summer study for STEM majors in recognition of the difficulty in taking time away from the schedule.

The Gilman [scholarship program](http://exchanges.state.gov/us/program/benjamin-gilman-international-scholarship-program) will also give you up to $8,000 to study abroad since you want to learn Russian. You could probably do a summer program instead of an academic year one.

You might also consider learning another central Asian language, like Azerbaijani (which is covered by both programs at the beginner level) or Kyrgyz, Ukrainian, Tajik (covered by the Boren) or Uzbek or Kazakh. These are designated critical languages by the U.S. State Department, and so there are more scholarships that cover them. Russian is too, but usually you have to be at a higher level in Russian to get them because you can more easily take a Russian class than a Kyrgyz class in the U.S.

You might also consider a summer language session at Middlebury; they offer Russian!