Slavic Languages and Societies Commons^™

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.

Full Issue

Russian Language Journal

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Volume 64

Russian Language Journal

On behalf of the editorial team of the Russian Language Journal, it is with great pleasure that we present Volume 64. The current issue of RLJ sees an expansion of our reinstated section of reviews, under Professor Michael Gorham’s editorship, as well as a special section, Humanities+, edited by Dr. Tony Brown of Brigham Young University, on the excellent joint Symposium held there this past January by the Russian State University for the Humanities and BYU. His summary appears next; as a participant in the symposium, I can report that the papers collected here present the symposium’s thought-provoking perspective on …

Introduction To Articles From The 2014 Annual Conference Of The Russian State University For The Humanities American Studies Center: Special Section On Humanities+, N. Anthony Brown

Russian Language Journal

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Professor Marina Kaul of the Russian State University for the Humanities (RGGU), together with Professor Irwin Weil of Northwestern University, co-founded the American Studies Center at RGGU, the two-fold goals of which were 1) to expose post-Soviet Russian scholars and students to a reasonably objective view and appreciation of American history, culture, and politics; and 2) to help American scholars and students to see themselves as others saw them. Thus far, the Center has held annual conferences, facilitated professional and student exchanges, and published numerous conference proceedings. It has enjoyed the …

The Language Flagship Model And The Humanities, Sam Eisen

Russian Language Journal

The Language Flagship program provides a model that strengthens and deepens cultural engagement within the humanities and creates bridges to collaboration across disciplines. Flagship addresses needs for national security and global competitiveness and integrates professional and life experience into the humanities and other fields for the students who engage in this course of study. The cross-disciplinary nature of the Flagship program and the level of personal, cultural and professional engagement required to complete the program are successfully changing the undergraduate study experience in ways that address significant issues in the ongoing discussion of a crisis in the humanities. The Language …

The University Of Rhode Island International Engineering Program: A Model For The Merger Of Technology And The Humanities, John M. Grandin, Sigrid Berka

Russian Language Journal

Contrary to a long-established and seemingly irrefutable tradition, American parents, educators, private and public sector leaders, and students are beginning to doubt the value of a university education. Charges have been leveled, for example, that students today are spending substantially less time on academics than their predecessors and are making little progress during their undergraduate years in their ability to read, write, speak, or think analytically and critically (see, for example, Arum and Roksa 2011, Vedder and Denhart 2011). Others have argued that college is burdening young people with lifelong debt to the degree that it is stifling their creativity …

Thoughts On High Level Proficiency In Arabic, Russian And English With A Platitudinous Postlude, James Bernhardt

Russian Language Journal

In the present paper, I look at the top of the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) Skill Level Descriptions and critique several of their assumptions. As I do this, I speak for myself and not for the Government in general or the U.S. Department of State in particular. I also do not pretend that my conclusions are not uncontroversial. I also discuss the 2012 ACTFL proficiency standards, but note that we do not train to those standards at the Foreign Service Institute.

Foreign Language Study Coupled With Internship Experience As An Entrée To Professional Opportunities, N. Anthony Brown

Russian Language Journal

Today’s global age presents its share of unique challenges, not the least of which is communication. Whereas in past centuries, fossil fuels played a central role in driving economies and influencing policy decisions, “language is the new oil” in the twenty-first century.1 Some forward thinking individuals and organizations have responded to the times and teamed up with universities and government agencies to develop new and innovative foreign language programs. Consider, for example, the U.S. federally funded National Flagship Language Program that offers upwards of nine months to one year of intensive language instruction in the target language culture and experiential …

Developing Information Literacy Skills In The Beginning Language Classroom: A Case For Webquests, Ekaterina Nemtchinova

Russian Language Journal

To say that the Internet has had an enormous impact on the world of education is to state the obvious, and the world of foreign language education is no exception. The advancement of Internet technologies necessitates the development of a new set of abilities in conjunction with more traditional language competencies: in addition to being able to write compositions and read newspaper articles, foreign language students need to know how to compose e-mail messages, perform searches on the Internet, and use online information. In other words, students have to be information literate to adapt to today’s increasingly complex multimedia environment.

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 …

On Semantic Peculiarities Of Secondary Imperfective Verbs In Russian: Their In/Compatibility With The Notions Of Duration And Completion, Valentina S. Soboleva

Russian Language Journal

It is a well-known fact that some secondary imperfective verbs in Russian cannot express duration – a notion, ascribed to the imperfective aspect. Of the three, or even four, possible aspectual meanings of the imperfective aspect – duration / progressive continuity, general validity, and repetition – some secondary imperfective verbs are limited to expressing only iterativity, a notion of repetition, embedded in their lexical semantics. The interpretation of the term iterativity in this work is close to the one given by Mehlig (2006) in which the iterative predicate describes an unbounded number of repetitions and the particular meaning is embedded …

Politeness And Sociocultural Values In American And Russian Cultures Emerging From The Speech Act Of Complaint; Pragmatic Competence Of L2 Learners Of Russian, Beata Gallaher

Russian Language Journal

In the last two decades, there has been an increasing number of empirical studies on complaints that explore the effects of sociocultural values and linguistic politeness on the language performance of nativeand non-native speakers of English (Kasper 1981; Piotrowska 1987; Olshtain and Weinbach 1987, 1993; Trosborg 1995; Arent 1996; Murphy and Neu 1996; Kraft and Geluykens 2002, 2007; Tanck 2002; Umar 2006; Prykarpatska 2008). However, the empirical data on complaints by Russian native and non-native speakers remains scarce (Olshtain and Weinbach 1993; Gershenson 2003; Kozlova 2004; Perelmutter 2010). The research on complaints is particularly important for studying the impact of …

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 …

Review: Russian Case Morphology And The Syntactic Categories, John Frederick Bailyn

Russian Language Journal

David Pesetsky’s Russian Case Morphology and the Syntactic Categories (MIT Press, 2013) is one of the most thought-provoking works of theoretical linguistics to appear in many years. It provides a startlingly original analysis of a well-known thorny problem of Russian morpho-syntax, embedding the analysis of that puzzle within a radical rethinking of the role of case in syntactic theory, and taking us on a journey of consequences and extensions that challenge one’s views of many aspects of minimalist theory, including key components of case theory, phrase structure, locality and others. If a monograph is to be judged by its creativity, …

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.

Remarkable Russian Women In Pictures, Prose And Poetry, Marcelline Hutton

Zea E-Books Collection

Many Russian women of the late 19th and early 20th centuries tried to find happy marriages, authentic religious life, liberal education, and fulfilling work as artists, doctors, teachers, and political activists. Some very remarkable ones found these things in varying degrees, while others sought unsuccessfully but no less desperately to transcend the generations-old restrictions imposed by church, state, village, class, and gender.

Like a Slavic “Downton Abbey,” this book tells the stories, not just of their outward lives, but of their hearts and minds, their voices and dreams, their amazing accomplishments against overwhelming odds, and their roles as feminists and …

Results Of Research Of English Words Recently Borrowed Into Modern Russian, Brian K. Stimmler, David K. Hart

Journal of Undergraduate Research

My original intent was to research Russian dialects by means of English words recently borrowed into the Russian language. I was going to visit various cities and villages of Russia, ascertain to what degree key words had penetrated the local dialect, and record the pronunciation of these words. I suspected that some historical phonological rules (i.e. palatalization, assimilation, de-voicing, etc.) were no longer in effect. I was also interested in the semantic variation that was sure to be evident in the different regions of Russia.

Discovering Russian Research: Digitizing Local And Family Historical Documents, Kathryn Pope Blomberg, Thom Edlund

Journal of Undergraduate Research

As a student of Family History Research with Russian language skills, I have become very interested in learning the process of research for the areas that have been controlled by either the Czars or the USSR. Thus, I decided to go on an internship to a Russian speaking country to compliment my studies in Imperial Russian and Soviet genealogical research. Although I am a novice or maybe especially since I am a novice I felt this would be very beneficial to my studies. My faculty mentor Thom Edlund and I developed a project that would enable me to further my …

Language For Special Purposes At Byu — Business Russian, David V. Shurtleff, Dr. David K. Hart

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Business language courses were taught at American universities as early as the 1920’s but did not gain widespread acceptance until the 1980’s. A major reason for the growth of Language for Special Purposes (LSP) was the report of the President’s Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies, which focused on the decline of language skills in the U.S. and stressed the need for professionally linked foreign language courses. Linguistic skills, the report stated, are a plus when combined with professional knowledge in fields such as engineering and business.1

Summary Of Activities, Melinda Richards

Journal of Undergraduate Research

As a music/Honors Russian major, I had hoped to write an honors thesis that would combine both of these interests. I also wanted to spend some time living and studying in Russia to augment the year and a half that I spent in the Ukraine on a mission.