L. Vasiu, C. Bocoș – O gramatică… altfel: dezvoltarea competenței gramaticale în limba română ca limbă străină (RLS): nivelul A2, [An Innovative Approach in Teaching Grammar], Cluj-Napoca, Cluj University Press, 2023.
Book Review
L. Vasiu, C. Bocoș – O gramatică… altfel: dezvoltarea competenței gramaticale în limba română ca limbă străină (RLS): nivelul A2, [An Innovative Approach in Teaching Grammar], Cluj-Napoca, Cluj University Press, 2023.
Teaching Romanian as a foreign language is a relatively new field of study, which owes its evolution and openness to alterity as a form of globalisation and facilitation of mutual knowledge. Multiculturality and interculturality are tangible aspects of our daily activity and not just mere theoretical concepts that hardly find their applicability in everything that concerns our existential horizon. In an ever-changing society, it is necessary to articulate coherently one’s personal identity and self-image, so that dialogue can be carried out in an appropriate and informed manner, and so as to promote knowledge of the other from as many points of view as possible, especially when learning a foreign language.
This year, the Department of Romanian language, culture and civilisation of Babeș Bolyai University celebrates 50 years of activity, during which time the department’s collective has distinguished itself by its original and pragmatic vision in proposing coherently articulated approaches to learning Romanian as a foreign language. Moreover, it has constituted itself as a nucleus in the conceiving and elaborating of widely used materials in the field of Romanian as a foreign language, and the change of generations is naturally achieved in a process in which the disciples develop professionally, but not only, under the attentive guidance of the generations that have imposed the field of study at the Babeș-Bolyai University from Cluj-Napoca.
The volume O gramatică… altfel: dezvoltarea competenței gramaticale în limba română ca limbă străină (RLS): nivelul A2 [A grammar… differently: developing grammatical competence in Romanian as a foreign language (RLS): level A2], written by Lavinia-Iunia Vasiu and Cristina Bocoș, published by Cluj University Press in the year preceding the celebration of half a century of studies dedicated to foreigners who wish to learn Romanian and become familiar with Romanian culture and civilisation, is part of a tradition of the Cluj school, which has often assumed the role of pioneer in various fields. We have in mind, for example, other reference works on teaching Romanian as a foreign language, such as A Minimalist Description of the Romanian Language (A1, A2, B1, B2) or Romanian as foreign language textbooks. The links between the generations of the department are thus evident in a joint effort to map a field of study which in the case of other languages – such as English – has a long tradition.
Right from the very beginning, the volume presents itself as an appealing work that invites study and knowledge through the image of the pencils on the cover and the preference for colours recalling the pages of a notebook. In turn, the title of the volume captures both the limits of learning Romanian, being at A2 level, and, playfully, the fact that we are faced with a new grammar of the Romanian language, one written… in a different manner. The book’s varied and realistic images, age-appropriate to its students enhance the appeal in a language learning effort that addresses to all of our senses.
Structured in six learning units that address the main grammatical aspects studied at A2 level, the volume reshapes a seemingly sterile, descriptive field, condemned to routine, in a successful effort to teach Romanian grammar in a different way, which both capitalises on the Romanian school tradition of teaching Romanian as a foreign language, as well as reference works in the field of teaching foreign languages, especially English, and, at the same time, the experience of the authors, who are passionate about their chosen subject and enthusiastic about meeting each new challenge regarding Romanian as a foreign language, as it is stated in the preface of the volume.
The idea of the work, as the preface shows, was to present in a different way an apparently arid field, that of grammatical competence, which is inevitably subject to a descriptive approach that facilitates boredom. The grammatical content covered is that of level A2, according to A Minimalist Description of the Romanian Language (A1, A2, B1, B2) and Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. Companion Volume with New Descriptors (2018). Thus, the most used grammatical contents are treated in a new way: the compound perfect, the conjunctive, the comparison, the ordinal numeral, the genitive and the accusative. Each chapter contains, in addition to the grammatical aspects covered, three different areas that contribute to the development of communication skills in Romanian, vocabulary acquisition and familiarity with Romanian culture. This concerns the lexical area, communicative functions and (inter)cultural aspects.
Each chapter of the six mentioned above contains two parts: the first, entitled Discover – aims to present the grammatical principles of the concept to be learned, and the second, Practice – focuses on internalising and using the new grammar rules. The principles considered in each case are to treat grammatical competence in a cross curricula way, as part of the whole, aiming at developing communication competence as a whole, and to identify those elements which could contribute to increasing the motivation of foreign students, as motivation is perhaps the most important element when it comes to learning a foreign language. The examples given are related to a certain vision of Romanian and European identity, familiarising students with the vocabulary connected to these realities: Primul Război Mondial (First World War), Regina Elisabeta a II-a (Queen Elisabeth the Second), Delta Dunării (The Danube Delta), Piața Unirii (Union Square) etc.
As for the intercultural dimension of the volume, this is highlighted in the section entitled Pastila culturală (The Cultural Pill), which presents cultural issues relevant to Romanian culture in relation to other languages and cultures. For example, the unit on the compound perfect presents the formula for the beginning of Romanian Folk Tales/Fairy tales: A fost odată ca niciodată compared to the English formula: Once upon a time. The multitude of (inter)cultural aspects presented, coupled with the frequency of their use in concrete life situations, shows a strong interest in the pragmatic dimension of grammatical competence. There are specific greetings for certain occasions: birthdays, New Year, various cultural shocks (the list can be enriched by students working with the volume), aspects of traditional medicine, Romanian folklore characters, Romanian personalities, Romanian famous artists, sportsmen, geography of Romania, popular beliefs, Romanian sayings, Romanian jokes with doctors etc. All these are important milestones in terms of getting closer to the Romanian identity and understanding Romanian culture in the European context. At the same time, they provide the necessary premises for multicultural dialogue and understanding the other as a product of a certain culture and tradition, open to the knowledge of another culture, the Romanian one. Other aims of this approach, stated by the authors, are to develop a positive attitude towards the community of speakers of RFL, to enrich the knowledge of the world and, last but not least, to enrich the mental patterns of the students.
Grammatical explanations are kept to a minimum, the focus being on the production of discourse, on the pragmatic aspect of communication, taking into account the language in use and the most common contexts in which grammatical notions are used. The A2 level is the most difficult in terms of learning a foreign language as a foreign language, in terms of the content to be learnt, and the main reasons, as the authors point out, are as follows: the newly learnt structures do not have a corresponding structure in the mother tongue or they function and are constructed differently, being specific to the Romanian language. We have in mind, for example, the genitive form of the noun, which is extremely rich in Romanian, the use of the reflexive with the present conjunctive or the pronominal clauses. Grammatical explanations are provided using micro-metalanguage (MML) in order to assimilate the Romanian language mechanism, which is undoubtedly complex.
The authors show a high degree of creativity in the assignments, which is evident throughout the material. Many of the exercises are conceived as a dialogue of the book (A grammar…) with the students, but they also encourage dialogue and debate in the groups of students, the proposed textbook being, in this respect, a pretext for learning that achieves its purpose when it is abandoned. In this way, the authors encourage creativity and create the prerequisites for its manifestation in the Romanian as a foreign language class. Inferences, predictions, comparisons and analogies are encouraged and, in short, empathy is developed, seen as the ability to grasp a different perspective from that of the subject. The tasks are mainly concerned with production, interaction and mediation activities, rather than with reception, although the latter are not absent from the volume.
The playful dimension of the book, without being obvious from the start, is the necessary ingredient to increase students’ motivation and to get them out of the routine of grammar exercises. Through the proposed games, puzzles, humour, competitions, the use of the names of colleagues to place them in different situations in the book, Lavinia-Iunia Vasiu and Cristina Bocoș’ volume breaks the tradition that grammar is taught descriptively and presents itself as an original approach to teaching and learning Romanian as a foreign language. Far from being a purely theoretical tool, the volume proposes communicative situations as close as possible to the real situations of communication in which the student might find himself beyond the institutional learning space, relying pertinently on authentic interpersonal communication, which favours the process of learning Romanian as a foreign language and implicitly the acquisition of grammatical competence related to the A2 level, but not only.
The bibliography used by the authors in the production of the volume should also be acknowledged, which, as previously mentioned, draws on the tradition of the Romanian school in terms of teaching Romanian as a foreign language, as well as a series of reference works in the field of the use and norms of the Romanian language, such as DEX or DOOM3 (Dicționarul ortografic, ortoepic și morfologic al limbii române/The orthographic, orthoepic and morphological dictionary of the Romanian languages), published in 2021. The authors have also consulted a number of reference documents on European policy in the development of language competence, as well as numerous current works on teaching languages to non-native speakers, published by prestigious publishers, which gives validity to the proposed approach and places it in the wider sphere of foreign language teaching research.
O gramatică… altfel is presented as a complex work, which makes use of multiple knowledge and skills from different but complementary fields, such as linguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology, phonology, phonetics, cultural history, in a successful effort to bring foreign students closer to the Romanian language and identity. We are in the presence of a multicultural, polyphonic dialogue, in which the central element is the combined effort of learning communication skills in Romanian, with emphasis on grammatical competence.
To sum up, the book proposes a new approach, highly personalised, for learning Romanian as a foreign language, A2 level, and for familiarising with Romanian culture and civilisation. It is, in fact, an invitation to all foreign students who wish to get to know Romania through its language and culture in a playful and less formal way, without losing sight of the essential point – the development of grammatical competence in the Romanian language as a foreign language.
About the Author
Alin-Serafim Ștefănuț
Faculty of Letters, University of Oradea, Romania
References
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