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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
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
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 …
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 …
Make Me Talk: A Bichronous Russian Language Course For Beginners, Olga Garabrandt, Irina Six
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 …
Assessment Design In Online Russian Language Courses: Lessons From Covid-19, Yuliana Gunn
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.
Developing Russian Oral Skills In The Online Environment, Elena Doludenko
Developing Russian Oral Skills In The Online Environment, Elena Doludenko
Russian Language Journal
The global pandemic due to COVID-19 forced classes to go into online or remote modes in a very short period of time. Instructors teaching languages, including Russian, had to adjust assignments and tasks to continue developing oral skills in the new environment. This paper describes various activities and techniques used in synchronous and asynchronous online Russian classes since March 2020. These activities ensured that L2 students continued practicing Russian in new modalities. In particular, this article discusses the benefits of individual and paired recordings, paired work in Breakout Rooms in Zoom, individual work on pronunciation, and video projects. These activities …
Hybrids 2.0: Forward To A New Normal In Post-Pandemic Language Teaching, William J. Comer, Lynne Debenedette
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, …
Raise Your Hand: Online Language And Culture Instruction, Inclusivity, And Critical Pedagogy, Thomas Jesús Garza
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 …