Slavic Languages and Societies Commons^™

Becoming An Andegraund Poet: Elena Shvarts And The Literary Environment Of The Late Soviet Era, Laura Little

Slavic Studies Faculty Publications

My dissertation focuses on Elena Shvarts (1948-2010), a Russian-language poet of the “unofficial” culture that flourished alongside state-sponsored arts in the post-war USSR. I ask how Shvarts became a leading talent of her generation in 1960s-1970s Leningrad, producing a substantial and sophisticated body of work without access to traditional print audiences. Studying Shvarts’s strategies for self-realization enhances our understanding of the forces that shaped late Soviet literature and the cultural field of dissidence from within and without. I trace her formation and rise to recognition, interweaving discussions of the political, literary, and social environment of her youth and early adulthood …

Belief In The Unbelievable: Yakov Druskin And Chinari Metaphysics, Patrick D. Powers

Honors Papers

This project focuses on the philosophy of Yakov Druskin and its applicability as a lens through which to examine the metaphysical and religious elements of chinari literature. Formed in Leningrad at the dawn of the Soviet Union, the group of authors and philosophers known as the chinari has long been recognized as an important component of the Russian avant-garde. However, the role of religion and spirituality in their works remains under-examined, despite the fact that the group featured a prolific religious philosopher, Yakov Druskin. By exploring a selection of Druskin’s philosophical concepts and applying them to major chinari texts—Daniil Kharms’ …

From Blended Learning To Emergency Remote And Online Teaching: Successes, Challenges, And Prospects Of A Russian Language Program Before And During The Pandemic, Olga Klimova

Russian Language Journal

This paper reports on students’ perceptions of their learning experiences in this crisis-driven environment. It explores engagement at the behavioral, emotional, cognitive, agentic, and social levels. This exploration of the various levels of engagement adds to the view of engagement as a multidimensional concept whose various levels are often interconnected. They were complemented by an application of engagement facilitators and deterrents across the levels. This approach established categories that should be considered in a remote environment: interest; learning support; learner agency and autonomy; emotions; technology and external factors; social interaction; and social connection (see Table 1). The results have implications …

Language Gains In Intensive Synchronous Online And Face-To-Face Russian Immersion Programs: A Comparison, Jason Merrill, Evgeny Dengub, Dmitrii Pastushenkov

Russian Language Journal

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, most domestic language programs had to transition quickly to teaching online, often as emergency remote teaching, and many likely will retain some online offerings after the health crisis. This study’s goal was to compare the language gains of students in two intensive Russian summer language programs: 2019 face-to-face immersion and 2020 intensive synchronous online. Testing data included the results of entrance and exit oral, writing, and lexico-grammatical tests from 125 students in the face-to-face program and 59 students in the online program. The analyses revealed comparable learning gains in the 2019 and 2020 programs for …

Make Me Talk: A Bichronous Russian Language Course For Beginners, Olga Garabrandt, Irina Six

Russian Language Journal

This article reports on a new bichronous (combination of synchronous and asynchronous) online Russian course at the University of Kansas that was offered for the first time in Fall 2020. The article explains the key course development principles that guided the choice of the course structure, the types of activities, and the style of instruction. The article reports on teaching and assessment practices that worked well in the context of this course and could possibly serve as models for those planning to offer asynchronous and bichronous language courses. Additionally, the article summarizes the main outcomes of implementing the new bichronous …

Teaching Russian To Visually Impaired Students During Covid-19: Technological Tools, Teaching Strategies, And Digital Materials, Giorgia Pomarolli

Russian Language Journal

With the transition of traditional programs to emergency remote teaching contexts due to the COVID-19 crisis, we have been faced with a challenge that primarily concerns access to instruction for all students. This unprecedented situation has reshaped the issue of inclusive education. This paper aims at furthering the debate on inclusive distance education in Russian language learning by presenting the experience of teaching Russian as a foreign language (FL) at an elementary level to a group of 20 Italian native learners, including some who are visually impaired (VI). The course took place in Autumn 2020 and was originally planned as …

Assessment Design In Online Russian Language Courses: Lessons From Covid-19, Yuliana Gunn

Russian Language Journal

This article examines various tools, approaches, and strategies for conducting language assessments in an online environment for all language levels during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. To complement tools available through the learning management system, online assessments can be retooled to be more communicative and interactive tasks, and measure language gains across the three modes of communication (interpersonal, interpretive and presentational). This article argues for increasing transparency in online classrooms and provides insights into initial student receptiveness and preferences for these new online assessments through an examination of anonymous student survey results.

Hybrids 2.0: Forward To A New Normal In Post-Pandemic Language Teaching, William J. Comer, Lynne Debenedette

Russian Language Journal

This article reflects on possible ways of incorporating the practices and tools of pandemic-induced remote teaching into the post-pandemic face-to-face teaching of Russian. We posit that a large number of the tools and practices that face-to-face teachers adopted during the pandemic will continue to be useful and effective for accomplishing fundamental pedagogical imperatives such as curating learners’ access to input and providing opportunities for learners to interact with that input. Nevertheless, we also assert the benefits of synchronous face-to-face language instruction for building community and interaction. We explore ways of intentionally blending practices into new hybrid models of language instruction, …

From Error Annotation To Quantitative Analysis: Patterns In Russian Language Learning, Irina Kor Chahine, Ekaterina Uetova

Russian Language Journal

Although learner corpus research has been progressively growing into an independent branch of corpus linguistics, the learner corpus cannot yet fully benefit from corpus analysis methods. This is due to several technical obstacles involving data collection, error annotation, and finally, data processing. When it comes to data collection, compared to corpus linguistics, learner corpus is biased because some of the learner corpora are still collected manually: Optical character recognition (OCR) is not yet sophisticated enough to transform a student’s handwritten copy to a digitized text. This fact significantly slows the collection of learner corpora. Furthermore, typed students’ texts present another …

Review: Da!: A Practical Guide To Russian Grammar, Erik Houle

Russian Language Journal

The Russian contribution to the Routledge Concise Grammars series is Da!: A Practical Guide to Russian Grammar by Tatiana Filosova. Different from the reference grammars more-advanced students and scholars of Russian may turn to, this book’s intended audience is the less-experienced language learner. Those familiar with the first edition know that within each of the book’s thirty-one chapters, the author suggests the relevance of each chapter’s content according to three levels of proficiency: elementary (referred to as level one), lower intermediate (level two), and upper intermediate (level three). Each level is given a description based on approximate equivalents with and …

Review: Russian In Plain English: A Very Basic Russian Starter For Complete Beginners, Veta Chitnev

Russian Language Journal

Natalia Parker’s Russian in Plain English: A Very Basic Russian Starter for Complete Beginners is designed for beginning students and independent learners who are not familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet. The textbook’s primary aim is to help students develop skills in reading aloud in Russian with correct pronunciation. The textbook is divided into ten units. Each unit centers on particular letters and sounds rather than on a specific theme. Every unit includes an objective (with the title “What’s the Plan”), information on Russian letters and the sounds they denote, reading exercises, speaking activities that can be used individually or in …

Embodied Performance As Queer Theatre Historiography: Translation, Gender, Identity, And Temporalities In Mikhail Kuzmin's The Dangerous Precaution, Keenan Shionalyn

All Master's Theses

The “World of Art” and “The Tower,” two groups of symbolist artists in St. Petersburg at the turn of the 20^th century, are often noted for their contributions to queer art in poetry, literature, and the visual arts. However, the theatrical record has yet to acknowledge the significant contributions by these groups, largely ignoring their queer dramatic writings. Mikhail Kuzmin, a notable contributor in both groups of symbolists, is recognized for having contributed music to Meyerhold and Blok’s The Puppet Show but is less known for his multitude of plays. Seeking to remedy this problem, I examine one of …

Introduction To The Special Issue: Emergency Remote Teaching, Online Instruction, And The Community: Lessons From The Covid-19 Crisis In Language Education, Liudmila Klimanova, Jason Merrill, Shannon Donnally Spasova

Russian Language Journal

The COVID-19 crisis took all of us by surprise. Universities and schools, in unprecedented fashion, quickly began to move instruction online. In some universities, the switch to online instruction coincided with spring breaks, allowing instructors a brief period for hurried preparation, whereas other colleagues had only a few hours’ warning. In any case, few educators had previous experience with online instruction, so most were suddenly asked to teach in a completely new way. Despite these new challenges and the isolation necessitated by COVID-19, the language teaching community, in addition to adapting or creating courses for online delivery, was quick to …

Connecting Through Language And Culture Learning During The Covid-19 Pandemic: The University Of Wisconsin–Madison Russian Flagship Program, Karen Evans-Romaine, Dianna Murphy, Anna Tumarkin, Laura Marshall, Assel Almuratova

Russian Language Journal

Research on the experiences of U.S. college students with emergency remote instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic highlights the importance of human interaction and relationships for students’ learning, their satisfaction with their academic coursework, and their overall mental health and well-being. Given the centrality of interaction in second language acquisition and teaching, theCOVID-19 emergency has revealed that instructional programs in languages are uniquely positioned among all academic disciplines as potential sites for human connection in emergency and non-emergency contexts alike. This article offers a case study of how one postsecondary Russian program, the UW-Madison Russian Flagship, leveraged existing affordances in the …

Развитие Межкультурных Коммуникативных Компетенций В Условиях Виртуальной Учебной Программы: Трудности И Результаты, Лилия Ерушкина, Екатер Ина Смирнова, Анна Нгома

Russian Language Journal

К настоящему времени Национальный исследовательский Нижегородский государственный университет им. Н.И. Лобачевского (далее – Университет Лобачевского) имеет достаточно успешный опыт организации и реализации программы CLS (Critical Language Scholarship) Американских Советов по международному образованию (далее - программа), направленной на интенсивное изучение иностранных языков и погружение в культуру страны изучаемого языка.

Transliterated title: Razvitie mezhkul’turnikh kommunikativnikh navykov v usloviiakh virtual’noi uchebnoi programmy: trudnosti i resul’taty

Translated Title: The development of cross-cultural communication skills through a virtual study program: Challenges and lessons

Abstract: This article describes the experience of designing and implementing a Russian as a foreign language distance learning program for American students …

Student Engagement In A Remote Language Learning Environment: The Case Of Ukrainian, Olena Sivachenko, Alla Nedashkivska

Russian Language Journal

This paper explores student perceptions of engagement in remote first-year, second-year, and third-year Ukrainian as a foreign language courses at a postsecondary institution. It examines student engagement at five levels: behavioral, emotional, cognitive, agentic, and social. This exploration of engagement, using the case of Ukrainian, supports the view of engagement as a multidimensional concept in which the various levels are interconnected and influence one another. The article provides pedagogical advice that is relevant not only to the context of remote instruction.

Service-Provider Virtual Exchange As A Viable Alternative To Face-To-Face Speaking Practice: Data From Second- And Third-Year Russian Learners, Liudmila Klimanova, Valentina Vinokurova

Russian Language Journal

In the context of emergency remote language teaching during the pandemic, the biggest challenge for instructors has been to continue providing learners with opportunities to practice speaking and comprehension skills. Service provider virtual exchange (SPVE) platforms, such as Conversifi, Boomalang, TalkAbroad, iTalki, and LinguaMeeting have the potential to enrich the online learning experience by offering paid videoconferencing sessions with native-speaking language coaches at the students’ convenience. Research shows that regular videoconferencing with native-speaking peers may improve speaking ability (Saito and Akiyama 2017) and foster the development of intercultural competence (Tecedor and Vasseur 2020). This paper will discuss a pilot implementation …

Lessons From The Covid-19 Pandemic: Boosting Student Engagement, Anna Kolesnikova

Russian Language Journal

The COVID-19 pandemic reshaped education in previously unimaginable ways. The shift from traditional face-to-face settings to online challenged instructors to create new ways to maintain and even increase student engagement. Engagement lessons from the pandemic fall into four main categories: 1) keeping students on track with course progress; 2) course design approaches that increase engagement; 3) engagement through interactive techniques; and 4) emergency-specific techniques. Many of these ideas will be applicable to post-pandemic teaching.

Using Authentic Online Resources In Russian For Stem Coursework For Novice Through Superior Level Learners, Molly Thomasy Blasing

Russian Language Journal

This article makes a case for incorporating STEM content into Russian language courses at the Novice through Superior levels of proficiency. The author presents models of asynchronous learning activities based on authentic online resources developed for a Russian for STEM pilot course taught during the COVID-19 pandemic. These lessons can be employed in online or face-to-face courses to prepare students to speak, read, write, and understand the language of STEM fields in Russian.

Raise Your Hand: Online Language And Culture Instruction, Inclusivity, And Critical Pedagogy, Thomas Jesús Garza

Russian Language Journal

The strained pedagogies in the wake of the transition to virtual online delivery of instruction in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, while taxing some instructors’ and students’ patience, have also resulted in reimagined curricula and new opportunities for student engagement and participation in our language and culture courses. This essay presents a rationale for the creation of ecologies of equity and inclusion within online delivery of course content on platforms such as Zoom, including suggestions for creating Breakout Room tasks and activities that encourage critical engagement and dialogue among learners and facilitate the creation of “safe spaces” for open …