Reviews

Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 51, No. 3, Fall 2007: 656-659 (Keith Langston)

"Ronelle Alexander and Ellen Elias-Bursać have come to the rescue. Drawing on their considerable experience teaching BCS at Berkeley and Harvard, respectively, they have jointly produced the first textbook to give equal treatment to all three languages. All dialogues and most exercises are given in separate Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian versions; other exercises and the vocabulary lists clearly distinguish ekavian vs. ijekavian forms and lexical items that are not common to all three languages. The grammar explanations and notes also carefully point out other important differences in usage. The first three lessons give the Serbian texts in both Latin and Cyrillic, and in the rest of the book they alternate between the two alphabets.  (…)

"This textbook has many features to recommend it. The authors have made judicious choices in the selection of vocabulary and sequencing of grammatical topics. The admirably clear and concise grammar explanations are cross-referenced to fuller treatments in the companion volume; the information in the textbook itself is complete enough that students would not necessarily have to consult the separate grammar, but in this case some elaboration by the instructor would be helpful at times. Pitch accent and quantity are indicated by a simplified system of notation that is easy to understand and use. In contrast to the practice in other BCS textbooks with which I am familiar, accent and quantity are marked consistently throughout the text, and this alone would make this volume a vast improvement over its competitors. The dialogues, exercises, and other assignments provide good material for individual, pair, and group practice of new vocabulary and structures as well as review and consolidation of material already learned. The book is rich in cultural information and contains numerous black and white images and maps. The layout is attractive and easy to read, and there are very few typographical errors.   (…)

"Whether they are used separately or together, these volumes represent a great advancement in the study and teaching of BCS. In both cultural and linguistic terms they are the most complete, accurate, and up-to-date instructional materials available. They successfully provide a thorough description of the common linguistic structure shared by all three languages while fully recognizing the separate identity of each, and will be an invaluable resource for teachers, students, and scholars for years to come."


Canadian Slavonic Papers, 9/1/2007 (Danko Šipka)

"This work is pioneering in that it is the first since the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia to make academic course materials for BCS generally available to Englishspeaking learners. In the fifteen years since the country disintegrated, we have seen various instances of scholarly inexpertness in the discourse surrounding BCS (confusion of regional linguistic features with ethnic ones, oversimplification in the use of the scripts, uncritical acceptance of extreme ethnic nationalist views from the region, and so forth). The authors have thus entered a sensitive field that is prone to various distortions. With that in mind, I should emphasise at the outset that the present work remains impeccably free of any non-scholarly distortions. In every segment of both books, linguistic and cultural facts are presented with full scholarly integrity, in a balanced manner, without ethnic or political bias of any kind. The authors are to be applauded for such a general attitude, as they have navigated this dangerous zone masterfully.  (…)

"The layout of the course materials is the next feature of the work for which the authors deserve praise. In the textbook, the students have all they need for in-class activities. Those who are interested in more elaborate coverage of the structures and the sociolinguistic situation can purchase the grammar separately; those who work on their own can purchase the recordings; and finally, all those who are looking for more general information can consult the Web site. The layout is student-friendly. The value of the course books for students is considerable, given the high degree of accuracy and clarity of the facts presented in both books. Providing the lesson texts in different ethnic variants goes a long way to accommodating the diverse needs of both professional and heritage learners.

"Another strength of the course materials is the sequence in which BCS structural elements are introduced: they follow standard educational principles-from better-known to less-known, from simple to more complex. Thus, the authors first introduce the nominative case, then the accusative, followed by the genitive (these are familiar from English grammar); these cases are followed by the remaining case forms. As with the above-mentioned avoidance of any political distortions, here, too, the authors' educational expertise stands in positive contrast to some earlier Slavic-language textbooks which exhibit a dysfunctional sequencing of materials."

Full review available for download from HighBeam Research


SlavFile, Summer, 2007, Vol. 16, no. 3, Slavic Languages Division American Translators Association (Stephen Dickey)

"To conclude, BCST [the Textbook] contains an impressive course of materials for those wishing to learn and teach BCS, and is strikingly innovative in its consistent presentation of Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian in a side-by-side manner. The linguistic accuracy of Alexander and Bursać’s presentation is good, and more than adequate for a first-year textbook. It includes a great deal of cultural information in the lessons, probably more than any textbook I am aware of, as well as numerous black-and-white photographs from Belgrade, Sarajevo and Zagreb. The editing is excellent [...]. The grammar explanations, while generally good, are not always sufficiently complete to stand alone, and additional explanations must be taken either from BCSG [the Grammar] or some other source. The main drawback is the lack of structured problem-solving tasks (ordering in a restaurant, purchases, etc.), which instructors will have to add using their own materials. "

Full review available at: http://www.ata-divisions.org/SLD/slavfile/summer-2007.pdf

Forum for Modern Language Studies, 43:3 (July)

"The formatting and presentation are extremely clear, with total acknowledgement given to each of the three languages (and an awareness borne in mind of an emergence of Montenegrin). There are masses of examples, all fully glossed and explained, the whole both rigorously serious and pedagogically admirable. All prosodic information is consistently given - quite a novelty - such that we have here a new benchmark for descriptions of this language, or these languages."

Full review available at: http://fmls.oxfordjournals.org/current.dtl#REVIEWS

Errata

p. xiii, the name: Maša Čulumoić is missing from the Acknowledgments section.
p. 66, the forms given in the box on the lower righthand side of the page in the column furthest to the right under "not want" should read: nećemo, nećete, neće.
p. 249, Aleksa Šantić's date of death should be: 1924.
p. 295, the caption to the photograph should read: Ulica Kneza Mihailova, not Republic Square.
p. 315 In the upper lefthand corner, under the heading Latin, there are two lists. The one on the left is examples of capital letters, and the one to its right should be examples of lower case letters. The seventh letter down in the list of Latin capitals should be DŽ, not D. The first six letters of the list (A, B, C, Č, Ć, D) on the right are capitals when they should be lower case.

Comments

Please send your comments on BOSNIAN, CROATIAN, SERBIAN, A TEXTBOOK WITH EXERCISES AND BASIC GRAMMAR  to comments@bcsgrammarandtextbook.org.