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Semantic Bias As An Application Of The Universal Grammar Model In The Russian Language, Iryna Gural

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The theory of the Universal Grammar developed by Chomsky has been known for many years. The main idea behind the theory was that the processing of the language does not depend on the culture but it universal among all the languages. Further psycholinguistic studies developed the ideas about schematic comprehension of the language, giving rise to the idea of the "garden path effect". Research focused on the processing of the ambiguous sentences and found the tendency for readers to prefer interpretations of specific sentence areas as objects. The current study summarizes the ideas of psycholinguistic study and incorporates a novel …

Fields Of The Mind: An Integral Learning Styles Component Of The E&L Cognitive Styles Construct, Betty Lou Leaver, Andrew R. Corin

Russian Language Journal

The E&L Cognitive Styles Construct was developed in 1997 and copyrighted in 2002 by Ehrman, director of the Research, Evaluation, and Development Division at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), and Leaver, then an associate at the National Foreign Language Center. It was developed in order to organize the proliferation of validated cognitive styles into a single instrument with ten easy-to-understand subscales specifically for the field of foreign or second language (L2) learning and teaching (Leaver 1997, 2000; Ehrman and Leaver 2002). The first two subscales, which relate to fields of the mind, however, have often created confusion or misunderstanding among …

Word Order Patterns In The Writing Of Heritage And Second Language Learners Of Russian, Olesya Kisselev

Russian Language Journal

Word Order (WO) variability is an important feature of the Russian language. Appropriate use of WO patterns makes a Russian text meaningful and coherent and has larger implications for the grammaticality of sentences and the ability of the language user to interpret and convey the meaning of the utterance. In the words of the late Olga Kagan, “every learner and teacher of Russian would agree that acquisition of native-like WO is one of the most challenging hurdles on the path to the higher levels of language performance” (Kagan and Dillion 2004, 89). Despite this widely shared opinion, little is known …

Lexical Profile Of L2 Russian Textbooks, Ekaterina Talalakina, Tony Brown, Mikhail Kamrotov

Russian Language Journal

Traditionally, the link between vocabulary mastery and reading comprehension has been examined through the prism of lexical thresholds and vocabulary coverage (Milton 2009). Lexical thresholds represent the most frequent words in a language (i.e., lemmas, or dictionary forms of a word) and usually come in increments of 1,000. In relation to the Russian National Corpus, knowledge of the 1,000 most frequent lemmas allows for comprehension of 60% of a text’s vocabulary, 2,000 lemmas – 69%, and 10,000 – 85% (Lyashevskaya and Sharoff 2009, v). These figures support an earlier estimation by Brown (1996, 2), who claimed (without elaborating on what …

«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: Paper Victory;The Old Woman, James S. Levine, Anna S. Kudyma, Irina Walsh

Russian Language Journal

These two Readers are a welcome addition to the available authentic texts for learners of Russian at the intermediate level of proficiency (CEFR, 2011). Both of these James S. Levine-edited Readers have much to offer, not only in terms of their linguistic accessibility, but also through the way they might improve students’ cultural literacy and analytical skills when it comes to Russian literature. One’s reading skills, review of Russian grammar and vocabulary also stand to benefit from these two valuable volumes.

Review: An Introductory Course For Heritage Learners Of Russian, Anna Geisherik

Russian Language Journal

Rodnaya rech’ is a welcome newcomer to a rather empty field of modern Russian heritage language textbooks, previously represented on the US market only by the 2002 Russian for Russians textbook by Olga Kagan, Tatiana Akishina and Richard Robin. As a long-time instructor of heritage speaker courses, I have been using a combination of some parts of Olga Kagan’s book and dozens of pages of my own materials, which came together in an overcrowded course pack in need of a major makeover. Therefore, I am very excited to see a new textbook finally hit the market.

Review: Russian Function Words: Meaning And Use, Brendan Nieubuurt, Evelina Mendelevich

Russian Language Journal

Nabokov’s change in attitude toward Pushkin—a change from passive worshipper of Pushkin to self-assured interlocutor with him—he remains quiet about why Nabokov’s theory of translation changed so radically concerning Onegin. Shvabrin sets 1955 as the year of Nabokov’s “literalist” turn, though he makes little matter of the date itself. I wonder about the potential influence of surrounding events. Before he adopted his literalist rhetoric, which presented the translator as a meticulous scholar, Nabokov claimed that a translator must be a “creative genius” on par with the original poet. In 1955 Nabokov also published the novel that he knew to be …

Full Issue

Russian Language Journal

No abstract provided.

A New Argument For The Lexical Underspecification Of Causers, James E. Lavine, Leonard H. Babby

Faculty Journal Articles

This article shows how a systematic impersonalization alternation in Russian provides additional evidence for underspecification in argument structure. In the case of a large class of lexically causative verbs, the causer is realized either as a volitional Agent in the nominative case or as an oblique-marked, nonvolitional causer, depending on how the event is construed. A causative theory of accusative is advanced, according to which the mere presence of external causation is a sufficient condition for accusative licensing, including those cases that lack an external argument altogether. The analysis is extended to explain accusative preservation in the Icelandic “fate accusative” …

The Role Of Implicit Semantic Components During The Synthesis Of Russian Verbal Modifications (A Case Study For The Verbs Of Mechanical Phonation), Irina V. Ivliyeva

Arts, Languages and Philosophy Faculty Research & Creative Works

The article examines the implicit components in the meaning of semantically modified derivatives. Using the methods of componential analysis of definitions from various Russian explanatory and aspectual dictionaries, the implicit components in the sound verbs’ meanings are inventoried. The impact of the relevant implicit components on the synthesis process is examined; the dichotomy of the implicit components of meaning and corresponding synthesizing prefixes is identified. The productivity and typical colloquial usage of synthesized derivatives is demonstrated using data from the Russian National Corpus.

Blood, Water And Mars: Soviet Science And The Alchemy For A New Man, Sophie Y. Andarovna

All Master's Theses

The themes of blood, water and Mars in Soviet science and technology show the strong utopian and even religious foundations of Soviet society, which invariably centered around forging a new environment and, in so doing, a new variety of human to inhabit it. In the minds and experiments of some of the radical men behind Russia’s Revolution, blood was to create a more advanced, biologically “equal” humanity capable of potential immortality, while water was harnessed with the millenarian aim of transforming the Soviet Union’s vast landscape into fields of bountiful fertility, as well as cities of efficient industry. Mars represents …

Introduction To The Special Issue

Russian Language Journal

No abstract provided.

Russian Heritage Language Speakers In The U.S.: A Profile, Olga Kagan

Russian Language Journal

Brecht and Ingold (2002) advocate systematic efforts to develop heritage language (HL) pedagogy to remedy U.S. language deficits: “…because of [heritage language learners’(HLLs’)] existing language and cultural knowledge, they may require substantially less instructional time than other learners to develop these skills. This is especially true for speakers of the less commonly taught languages” (p. 1).

Russian is one of those less commonly taught languages in the U.S. that is critically important for national security and the global economy. Since the early 1970s, when a large wave of Russian-speaking immigrants began to settle in the U.S., American universities have had …

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

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 …

Designing And Integrating A Community-Based Learning Dimension Into A Traditional Proficiency-Based High School Curriculum, Elizabeth Lee Roby

Russian Language Journal

When considering the goals of language instruction, few would debate the importance of promoting a lifelong interest in learning language and culture in authentic contexts through engagement in multilingual communities. The World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages (2015) state that, to meet the Communities goal, students should be able to “communicate and interact with cultural competence in order to participate in multilingual communities at home and around the world” (9). Nonetheless, instructors often struggle to integrate authentic community engagement into the traditional classroom-based curriculum. The first years of language learning frequently include simulations and role-playing scenarios that duplicate situations in which …

Piloting A Dynamic Assessment Model: Russian Nominal Morphology As A Building Block For L2 Listening Development, Rimma Ableeva, Olga Thomason

Russian Language Journal

Second language (L2) Russian research identifies listening comprehension as the least developed language ability among university students and points to the importance of listening instruction in Russian programs (e.g., Rifkin 2005; Comer 2012a; Isurin 2013). For example, Rifkin (2005, 11) states that students typically exhibit an “intermediate-low level of L2 listening proficiency” after completion of a 4-year Russian program. According to Isurin (2013, 39), the survey conducted among L2 Russian learners and instructors acknowledged “listening comprehension as the most problematic area in students’ language proficiency in general.” Comer (2012a) attributes poor listening ability to insufficient teaching materials and activities as …

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 …

Review: Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment; Posobiie Dlia Inostrannykh Uchashchikhsia; The Russian Language Journal 68: 3-32, Larysa Stepanova

Russian Language Journal

No abstract provided.