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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Russian Peasants In Tolstoy’S War And Peace - Idealized And Instrumentalized, Antonia Seyfarth
Russian Peasants In Tolstoy’S War And Peace - Idealized And Instrumentalized, Antonia Seyfarth
The Yale Undergraduate Research Journal
In War and Peace, Tolstoy challenges Western European notions of Russian backwardness and ‘barbarity’ through his depiction of the virtuousness, spiritual wisdom, and rich cultural traditions of the common Russian people. This idealized portrayal of Russian peasants and soldiers is essential to Tolstoy’s construction of a Russian national myth that unites members of all social classes behind a shared set of values. However, in turning the Russian peasantry into idealized, oversimplified caricatures that lack individuality, complexity, agency, and the ability for critical thought, Tolstoy reduces these characters to mere instruments that provide morally edifying lessons to Russia’s elites. This imposition …
Heritage Language Learners Of Russian And L2 Learners In The Flagship Program: A Comparison, Olga Kagan, Anna Kudyma
Heritage Language Learners Of Russian And L2 Learners In The Flagship Program: A Comparison, Olga Kagan, Anna Kudyma
Russian Language Journal
In 2005, a consortium of schools consisting of Bryn Mawr College, University of Maryland, University of California Los Angeles, and Middlebury Summer School was formed in order to launch a Russian Flagship Program. Both participants and NSEP 1 felt that these universities would bring different strengths to the program: Maryland and Bryn Mawr, for example, would attract students returning from a year-long study abroad experience in Russia as administered by American Councils, and UCLA would attract heritage language learners from large Russian communities in both Northern and Southern California. As expected, the first cohort of UCLA Flagship students consisted of …
Teaching Compassion In The Russian Language And Literature Curriculum: An Essential Learning Outcome, Benjamin Rifkin
Teaching Compassion In The Russian Language And Literature Curriculum: An Essential Learning Outcome, Benjamin Rifkin
Russian Language Journal
One of Dr. Olga E. Kagan’s most important contributions to the language education field was a reconceptualization of the perspective of the language performance of heritage speakers of Russian. In the past, heritage speakers’ language was considered deficient in all the ways in which it diverged from Contemporary Standard Russian. Their lack of formal instruction in Russian or the interruption of their formal instruction due to their immigration from a Russophone country to North America was considered the source of numerous errors and anglicisms, which the Russian language curriculum was designed to eliminate. Teachers of Russian as a foreign language …
Businessmen And Ballerinas Take Different Forms: A Strategic Resource For Acquiring Russian Vocabulary And Morphology, Laura A. Janda
Businessmen And Ballerinas Take Different Forms: A Strategic Resource For Acquiring Russian Vocabulary And Morphology, Laura A. Janda
Russian Language Journal
Included in the tasks facing a language learner is the acquisition of a lexicon and a grammar. However, when the target language has inflectional morphology, these two parts of the language-learning task intersect in the paradigms of grammatical word forms because each open-class lexeme has a number of forms that allow it to express various combinations of grammatical categories. Among major world languages, Russian is relatively highly inflected, meaning that the challenges of acquiring vocabulary are compounded by the need to master the inflectional morphology. Even a modest basic vocabulary of a few thousand inflected lexemes has over a hundred …
«В Каком Контексте?»: A Context-Based Approach To Teaching Verbs Of Motion, Irina Six
«В Каком Контексте?»: A Context-Based Approach To Teaching Verbs Of Motion, Irina Six
Russian Language Journal
Anyone who has studied or taught Russian using the textbook В пути, authored by Olga Kagan, Frank Miller, and Ganna Kudyma, is probably familiar with the following thought-provoking prompt: В каком контексте? ‘Think of a situation when you could say’: Ты звонила домой сегодня? – Ты позвонила домой сегодня? ‘Did you call [imperfective] home today? – Did you call [perfective] home today?’ or Они не приходили. – Они не пришли. ‘They did not come [imperfective]. – They did not come [perfective]’(Kagan, Miller and Kudyma 2006, 79). This is one of the rare examples of assignments where Russian as a Second …
Review: Studies In Phonological Theory And Historical Linguistics, James Joshua Pennington
Review: Studies In Phonological Theory And Historical Linguistics, James Joshua Pennington
Russian Language Journal
This volume represents a definitive collection of Bill Darden’s research over his career of more than forty years as a linguist. The book is divided along his main areas of expertise into two parts: (1) “Historical Linguistics,” consisting of 17 chapters that cover a variety of problematic issues in Indo-European, Balto-Slavic, and Slavic historical phonology, morphology, and syntax; and (2) “Phonological Theory,” comprising 10 articles, which illustrate Darden’s approach to tackling difficult issues in phonological theory through examples from Russian and Greenlandic.
The Development Of Syntactic Complexity In The Writing Of Russian Language Learners: A Longitudinal Corpus Study, Olesya V. Kisselev, Anna A. Alsufieva
The Development Of Syntactic Complexity In The Writing Of Russian Language Learners: A Longitudinal Corpus Study, Olesya V. Kisselev, Anna A. Alsufieva
Russian Language Journal
To make inferences about how second language (L2) learners develop over time, most Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research has traditionally relied on cross-sectional one-time sampling design, in which data collected from different groups of learners at different levels of language proficiency are compared against a preestablished set of measures. Rarer are longitudinal studies, in which researchers track a small number of participants over a relatively long period of time. Recent developments in technology and the rise of the language corpora have made it possible to combine the benefits of these two approaches; longitudinal LEARNER LANGUAGE CORPORA, large databases collected continuously …
Review: Mezhdu Nami, Jim Sweigert
Review: Mezhdu Nami, Jim Sweigert
Russian Language Journal
Между нами marks a new and quite remarkable approach to the teaching and learning of Russian. In place of the typical print textbook series is an online text that also incorporates some aspects of more traditional Russian language textbooks. Indeed, this is perhaps the first time that a Russian language textbook for the North American market has provided students with an entry point that is nearly entirely in an online format. As the authors state, “Между нами is a free, web-based textbook that provides a comprehensive introduction to Russian language and culture. It is organized around the experiences of four …
Review: Studies In Accentology And Slavic Linguistics In Honor Of Ronald F. Feldstein; Exploring The Us Language Flagship Program: Professional Competence In A Second Language By Graduations, Ljiljana Durašković, Grant H. Lundberg
Review: Studies In Accentology And Slavic Linguistics In Honor Of Ronald F. Feldstein; Exploring The Us Language Flagship Program: Professional Competence In A Second Language By Graduations, Ljiljana Durašković, Grant H. Lundberg
Russian Language Journal
As the title states, this volume was compiled in honor of the work and influence of Ronald F. Feldstein on the fields of accentology and Slavic linguistics. Though Professor Feldstein did some work in most of the areas covered in the volume, the book is unified by the ideas of the Prague Linguistic Circle and Jakobsonian structuralism, of which Feldstein was an important representative for many Slavic linguists working today.
Review: Poetry Reader For Russian Learners; Siblings In Tolstoy And Dostoevsky: The Path To Universal Brotherhood, Richard Robin, Naya Lekht
Review: Poetry Reader For Russian Learners; Siblings In Tolstoy And Dostoevsky: The Path To Universal Brotherhood, Richard Robin, Naya Lekht
Russian Language Journal
Overall, the book does a thorough job of documentation. In proficiency terms, it reads more like a fancy “Advanced High” text than “Superior.” The authors do not speculate about the potentially more controversial conclusions pertaining to some of the postulates underlying the program until toward the end of the volume. After all, it is unlikely that a school with only two years of Russian aiming for an “Intermediate Low” speaking proficiency will create a two-year curriculum with the intent to prepare participants for a fourth year at “Advanced.” Most of the interesting speculations come in Al-Batal and Glakas’s view of …
Review: How Russian Came To Be The Way It Is. A Student Guide To The History Of The Russian Language; Studies In Accentology And Slavic Linguistics In Honor Of Ronald F. Feldstein, Ljiljana Durašković
Review: How Russian Came To Be The Way It Is. A Student Guide To The History Of The Russian Language; Studies In Accentology And Slavic Linguistics In Honor Of Ronald F. Feldstein, Ljiljana Durašković
Russian Language Journal
Tore Nesset is professor of Russian Linguistics at Arctic University of Norway. As many other professors, he has frequently found himself in situations where the simple conjugation of a verb like писать ‘write’ (1) triggered many questions from his Russian class. It is in practice impossible “to travel through time/centuries” every time a new exceptional form is introduced or mentioned in the setting of a language class. How Russian Came to Be the Way It Is is designed to make Russian more accessible to students by shedding light on Russian linguistic changes over its history.
Review: Exploring The Us Language Flagship Program: Professional Competence In A Second Language By Graduations; Poetry Reader For Russian Learners, Grant H. Lundberg, Richard Robin
Review: Exploring The Us Language Flagship Program: Professional Competence In A Second Language By Graduations; Poetry Reader For Russian Learners, Grant H. Lundberg, Richard Robin
Russian Language Journal
Concepts of the Prague Linguistic Circle on the American Continent and the Theory of Emotive Language,” discusses the structuralist ideas of the PLC in her publications on the semiotics of language and literary analysis. Steven Franks and Catherine Rudin’s contribution, “Invariant -to in Bulgarian,” investigates the connection of invariant -to, found in relative clauses and wh-constructions, to inflectional -to, found in the neuter definite article. They use syntactic theory as well as comparative Macedonian data to examine the issue. Finally, Donald Reindl, “The Fate of German (Post)Velars in Slovenian Loanwords,” tries to impose some order on a seemingly chaotic situation. …
Constructing A Russian Elicited Imitation Exam, Troy Cox, Jennifer Bown, Jacob Burdis
Constructing A Russian Elicited Imitation Exam, Troy Cox, Jennifer Bown, Jacob Burdis
Russian Language Journal
A Russian student wants to know if it is worth the expense to pay for an official ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI). The director of a flagship program wants to measure the improvement of the oral proficiency of students returning from their in-country experience. A university department needs to provide evidence that their students are meeting learning objectives as part of accreditation. In each of these cases, a cost-effective, scalable solution to measuring oral proficiency would be helpful.
On The Expressive Function Of Russian Quantitative Aktionsarten In Speech, Elena Nikolaenko
On The Expressive Function Of Russian Quantitative Aktionsarten In Speech, Elena Nikolaenko
Russian Language Journal
The goal of this article is to examine the expressive function of Russian quantitative Aktionsarten in oral and written speech from the perspective of functional grammar and cognitive linguistics, the theoretical principles of which are outlined below. The focus will be on occasionally used Aktionsarten, which name an action quantity as “greater than the norm”; the term is used by native Russian speakers to express personal appreciation/depreciation of the action.
The Effect Of Teaching Vocabulary In Semantic Groups: A Study In The Russian Language Classroom, Kate White
The Effect Of Teaching Vocabulary In Semantic Groups: A Study In The Russian Language Classroom, Kate White
Russian Language Journal
A long-standing assumption in the field of second language acquisition research is that learning new vocabulary items in semantic groupings has a positive effect on acquisition and retention (Finkbeiner and Nicol 2003). This assumption is common among researchers and instructors of second languages, as it seems to fit intuitively with the most popular current communicative approaches to teaching. However, researchers have begun to question this assumption, as it has not been supported by empirical evidence (Altarriba and Mathis 1997; Finkbeiner and Nicol 2003; Papathanasiou 2009). Previous research is not conclusive on the topic due to differences in methodology and design. …
The Russian Prepositions Перед, Против And Напротив: A Cognitive Linguistic Approach, Marika Kalyuga
The Russian Prepositions Перед, Против And Напротив: A Cognitive Linguistic Approach, Marika Kalyuga
Russian Language Journal
There is an assumption in cognitive linguistics that most non-spatial senses of a preposition and a case are derived from a common (usually spatial) sense through metaphoric extensions. The metaphoric extensions involve the understanding of a concept, the so-called “target,” in terms of a more simple, concrete concept called the “source” (Lakoff 1987; Boers 1996; Boers & Demecheleer 1998). For this reason, prepositions and cases with a similar spatial sense frequently develop similar non-spatial senses. For example, the Ancient Greek prepositions πρό ‘before’ and ἀντί ‘opposite’ are associated with nearly the same proto-scenario or idealized mental representation of events linked …
Are Russian Aspectual Prefixes Empty Or Full (And Does It Matter)?, Oscar E. Swan
Are Russian Aspectual Prefixes Empty Or Full (And Does It Matter)?, Oscar E. Swan
Russian Language Journal
A review of Laura A. Janda, Anna Endresen, Julia Kuznetsova, Olga Lyashkevskaya, Anastasia Makarova, Tore Nesset, and Svetlana Sokolova. 2013. Why Russian Aspectual Prefixes Aren’t Empty: Prefixes as Verb Classifiers. Bloomington, IN: Slavica. References. xv + 211 pp. Paper.
Aspect And The Russian Verbal Base Form, Oscar E. Swan
Aspect And The Russian Verbal Base Form, Oscar E. Swan
Russian Language Journal
Roman Jakobson’s 1948 single-stem analysis of the Russian verb inspired many imitations and applications around the Slavic world, especially in American Russian pedagogy, where the names Alexander Lipson, Charles Townsend, and Maurice Levin come most readily to mind (see References). The first is a by-now dated two-part textbook series, grammatically innovative for its time, that is still available on the internet (although as far as I know it is not actually used anywhere), while the applied linguistic works by Townsend and Levin are still in print and are commonly used in graduate courses on the structure of Russian. It is …
Review: Russian From Intermediate To Advanced, Cori Anderson
Review: Russian From Intermediate To Advanced, Cori Anderson
Russian Language Journal
Russian from Intermediate to Advanced is a new and innovative textbook designed for students who wish to reach an advanced level of proficiency in all modalities (speaking, listening, reading and writing), according to the ACTFL scale. The book is designed to reflect the ACTFL proficiency guidelines for all four skills, as well as the skills tested in the TORFL. The authors have also produced a companion website, which features audio and video components, as well as grammar exercises. These materials can be used in a traditional one-year course, an intensive summer- or academic-year course, or over multiple years of study, …
Review: The Forms Of Russian, Grant H. Lundberg
Review: The Forms Of Russian, Grant H. Lundberg
Russian Language Journal
The Forms of Russian is a traditional approach to the fundamentals of Russian morphology based largely on the work of Jakobson, Levin, Lipson and Townsend. It is essentially the introductory course on Russian morphology that many, if not most, working North American Slavists took in graduate school. The work arises from such a course taught over many years by the author. The book is clearly intended for future teachers of Russian. The two main goals of the book are (1) to make working with and using Russian easier and (2) to explain how to establish a systematic description of Russian. …
Review: Fundamentals Of The Structure And History Of Russian: A Usage-Based Approach, David J. Birnbaum
Review: Fundamentals Of The Structure And History Of Russian: A Usage-Based Approach, David J. Birnbaum
Russian Language Journal
Fundamentals distinguishes itself from other English-language textbooks about the structure of Russian by being usage-based, which means that the authors eschew underlying abstract forms and ordered rules and instead anchor their synchronic description of Russian phonetics, phonology, and morphology in correspondences and choices among surface forms. (ix, 56ff.) The assertion that “a usage based description […] renders a better picture of [phonetic and orthographic] reality than the generative-based description” (56; bracketed text added) is self-evidently true, and it is hard not to appreciate the difference the authors draw between generative production and what they archly call degeneration in the case …
Accuracy In Predicting Cross-Lingual Differential Item Functioning (Dif): A Study Of Russian To Kyrgyz Language Test Item Adaptation In The Kyrgyz Republic, Todd Drummond
Russian Language Journal
Russian-speaking teachers, assessment specialists, and other educators in Eurasia are frequently tasked with effectively translating and adapting sophisticated educational materials from Russian into non- Slavic languages. While standards, textbooks, and other teaching materials have been adapted from Russian to other Eurasian languages for over a century, a contemporary challenge is the adaptation of highly complex, standardized tests and assessments produced in the Russian language (Drummond and Gabrscek 2012). Because the results of educational assessments are often employed in high stakes decision making, the room for error in the adaptation of cross-lingual tests is small: Capturing exact meaning in all language …
Review: “The Other” In Translation: A Case For Comparative Translation Studies, Sibelan Forrester
Review: “The Other” In Translation: A Case For Comparative Translation Studies, Sibelan Forrester
Russian Language Journal
Alexander Burak’s book “The Other” in Translation does two things: it draws attention to the field of Comparative Translation Discourse Analysis, with reference to numerous concrete examples, and it offers thought provoking and informative discussion of a number of translation situations drawn from the interactions of Russian and Anglophone literature and culture. The book will be especially interesting to students and teachers of Russian at all levels, but it also has a great deal to offer readers from other languages and literatures, especially those with a background in translation studies.
Review: The Meek One: A Fantastic Story: An Annotated Russian Reader, Cynthia L. Martin
Review: The Meek One: A Fantastic Story: An Annotated Russian Reader, Cynthia L. Martin
Russian Language Journal
Both of these readers are excellent additions to available annotated readers for students of Russian that would be most appropriate after students have completed two full years of Russian.
Traditions And Transitions: Russian Language Teaching In The United States. In Celebration Of The Career Of Dr. Victorina Lefebvre, Jason Merrill, Lora Mjolsness
Traditions And Transitions: Russian Language Teaching In The United States. In Celebration Of The Career Of Dr. Victorina Lefebvre, Jason Merrill, Lora Mjolsness
Russian Language Journal
In May 2012, the University of California, Irvine’s Humanities Language Learning Program hosted a symposium entitled Traditions and Transitions: Russian Language Teaching in the United States. The primary impetus for the meeting was to celebrate the distinguished career of our colleague, Dr. Victorina Lefebvre, who taught Russian language courses at University of California, Irvine since 1984. Her retirement in June 2012 meant the symposium was an opportunity to recognize and thank her for her unflagging decades of hard work for UC Irvine’s students. Victorina Lefebvre, who trained in the USSR in mathematics and physics education (M.A.) and in psychology (Ph.D.), …
Hits And Misses In Teaching Russian In The Us: The Perspectives Of Instructors, Students, And Enrollment, Ludmila Isurin
Hits And Misses In Teaching Russian In The Us: The Perspectives Of Instructors, Students, And Enrollment, Ludmila Isurin
Russian Language Journal
In U.S. universities, interest in learning Russian as a foreign language has been relatively steady over the last 50 years. The so-called “Sputnik effect”―a surge of interest in the Russian language due to the launch of the first Soviet sputnik in 1957 and, as a result, the shocking revelation that the USSR might become a serious rival―is considered the beginning of a new era, during which Russian language programs were established at major American universities. The interest in learning Russian did not subside during Gorbachev’s Perestroika in the mid-1980s; neither did it weaken right after the collapse of the USSR …
Results 2012: Using Flagship Data To Develop A Russian Learner Corpus Of Academic Writing, Anna A. Alsufieva, Olesya V. Kisselev, Sandra G. Freels
Results 2012: Using Flagship Data To Develop A Russian Learner Corpus Of Academic Writing, Anna A. Alsufieva, Olesya V. Kisselev, Sandra G. Freels
Russian Language Journal
This paper presents a project developed at the Russian Flagship Center at Portland State University, the pilot Russian Learner Corpus of Academic Writing (piRULEC). PiRULEC is the first of its kind Russian learner corpus that contains academic texts written on a variety of topics produced by advanced learners of Russian from a variety of linguistic backgrounds (heritage speakers of Russian and mainstream American students).
Some Like It Hot – Goblin‐Style: “Ozhivliazh” In Russian Film Translations, Alexander Burak
Some Like It Hot – Goblin‐Style: “Ozhivliazh” In Russian Film Translations, Alexander Burak
Russian Language Journal
This article is about English‐to‐Russian voiceover translating as a translation technique and a medium that responds to and shapes sociocultural identities. It is also about a trend in Russian film translating to enliven – in various degrees – the translation text as compared with the more neutral language in the original films. And, finally, given the multiple translations of the same cultural products, films included, it is an attempt to make a case for a strand of research and translation quality analysis that that may be called “translation variance studies.”
On The Status Of Russian Perfective Passives In –Sja, James S. Levine
On The Status Of Russian Perfective Passives In –Sja, James S. Levine
Russian Language Journal
In an early and important study of voice in Russian, Babby and Brecht (1975) introduced significant theoretical revisions to prevailing transformational analyses of passives in Russian. In their article, B&B demonstrated the inadequacies of previous analyses, which posited a single “passive transformation” for Russian. Instead, they proposed an analysis of voice that achieved maximum generality by accounting in a principled way for the syntactic relations between active, passive, and middle sentences. In particular, they argued that passives formed with the suffix –en-‐‑ must be derived differently from passives in –sja, the former resulting from a lexical process that derived –en-‐‑adjectives …
À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu: Russian -‐‑Sja And -‐‑En-‐‑ In Asbmt, Leonard H. Babby
À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu: Russian -‐‑Sja And -‐‑En-‐‑ In Asbmt, Leonard H. Babby
Russian Language Journal
In 1973-‐‑74, Dick Brecht and I wrote an article entitled The Syntax of Voice in Russian, which appeared in Language in 1975 (hereafter B&B 1975). Since then Dick and I have gone off in different directions, but I have returned periodically to the rich vein of data and problems in our paper and return to them again here, this time within the frame-‐‑ work of the argument-‐‑structure based theory of morphosyntax (ASBMT) proposed in Babby 2009, 2010a, 2010b, and 2011, which has enabled me, after the passage of 35 years, to pinpoint what was right in the Syntax of Voice …