It rots from the top
Back in September, I headed down to Moscow to record audio for the latest edition of a textbook preparing students for the dreaded Russian State Exams. This was my second time doing it, and the recording session went by quickly and relatively pleasantly, considering that this was the middle of a 24-hour-long workday. It began the night before with an almost-midnight train from St. Petersburg that would return me to the Venice of the North after 6.5 hours of recording.
The studio, immaculately sound-proofed, has no ventilation or cooling, so it’s hardly a luxury experience. Still, the speed with which one of the textbook creators and I ran through the scripts impressed us both. As I left, she told me that we’d likely need one more session in October. Not eager to repeat my day-long commute, I proposed doing it remotely from a Petersburg studio where I have worked since the spring, doing voiceovers for cartoons and narration/voice acting for documentaries. She agreed to this.
I went into the studio to wrap up recording earlier than planned, in late September. We didn’t have more content to record: it turns out that there was, allegedly, a problem with intonation. According to the standards of the Russian government, falling intonation is required for Wh-questions (What are you doing today?) or questions with defined answers (Liberty or death?) with rising intantion demanded for Do/Is questions (Do you like football? Is your cat friendly? Do you want to Follow me on Instagram?).
This was rather difficult for me to do because it is so unnatural.
In the initial recordings, I read them like I would were they my actual questions, with the stress on the question words and little to no deviation in how high or low my voice was for the rest of the sentence.
The textbook author insisted that I follow through, though, because these are the standards of the Russian State Exam for English. That is, Russian students are taught, tested, and judged on how well they produce English in a manner no normal person would use.
By these standards, anyone from England, Scotland, Ireland, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or Wales that didn’t noticeably raise their pitch while asking a question would officially be “bad at English.” This is preposterous, of course, but it is how English is taught and learned here.
This episode is a rather benign example of the damage that can be done to genuine learning when a state bureaucracy, lacking in expertise or even competence, bends learners to its will. Especially considering what a humanistic endeavor learning a language is, the paper-pushers and Highly-Qualified Philologists who put their thumbs on the scales of what constitutes “good” versus “bad” English are downright evil.
