Slavic Languages and Societies Commons^™

Redesigning Our Curricula To Foster Career Readiness, Benjamin Rifkin

Russian Language Journal

Undergraduate majors are not engraved in stone; curricula have been adjusted and changed over the course of the history of higher education and now is the time to change our curricula once again. This article proposes a reconceptualization of the undergraduate major in Russian away from the framework of “coverage of the humanistic canon” to a framework focusing on the development of transferable or durable skills, i.e., skills that can be deployed in numerous employment contexts throughout an individual’s career trajectory to support career-readiness, in accordance with powerful frameworks offered by prominent educational organizations. This approach helps us support the …

What Do Learners Do With A Foreign Language After Their Studies? A Survey Of Alumni Of A Russian Summer Immersion Program, Dmitrii Pastushenkov, Liya Zalaltdinova, Jason Merrill

Russian Language Journal

Responding to concerns about the long-term value of foreign language education, this exploratory survey-based study examines how Russian language learners (N = 321) continued to use the language after completing a summer immersion program. The study investigates language use in personal and professional contexts and identifies resources alumni used, recommended, and needed to maintain proficiency. Although opportunities for conversational practice were limited, and interaction in Russian was one of the activities alumni needed but often viewed as unattainable, about 60% of participants continued using Russian at least occasionally. Among those employed full time, 24% used Russian frequently, primarily in …

Motion Verbs And Secondary Predications: What Corpus Data Can Tell The Classroom Practitioner, Tore Nesset

Russian Language Journal

The Russian secondary predication construction in (1) and (2) has received considerable attention in theoretical linguistics but has been less prominent in the pedagogical literature on motion verbs. This lack of prominence in the pedagogical literature is regrettable since verbs of motion figure prominently in the construction and since the construction represents an important challenge for second language (L2) learners of Russian:

(1) Ты сюда зачем пьяный пришел? (Андрей Житков. Супермаркет, 2000)

(2) Первым на обсуждение был вынесен проект постановления «О поддержке курса Украины на интеграцию в Европейский союз» авторства Арсения Яценюка. (Ольга Куришко. В большинстве своем // Коммерсант, 14.01.2013) …

Multidisciplinary Collaboration For The Integration Of Ai In Slavic Languages And Literatures: The Learning Lab Model, Anna Ivanov

Russian Language Journal

The Learning Lab at Harvard University's Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning employs graduate students as Media and Design Fellows (MDFs) to support innovative pedagogy in their departments. Over the last few years and in its Summer of AI, the Learning Lab has explored AI and its applications and implications in education. As such, the Lab, its staff, and its MDFs have developed and run well-structured, intellectually rigorous learning opportunities for many departments. For the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, the Learning Lab used AI in language and literature workshops. This paper presents a few case studies of …

You Want Me To Do What? But I Can’T Read That... Cataloging Soviet Russia Space Exploration Books, Katherine Loving, Phillip Fitzsimmons, Ekaterina Kitova

Faculty Articles & Research

The Al Harris Library received a donation of the archive of retired astronaut General Thomas P. Stafford. The continually growing collection includes over 200 boxes containing NASA reports, professional and personal pictures, videos, and more. Part of the collection is the approximately 700 books used for research by Stafford and his co-author Michael Cassutt to write the memoir We Have Capture: Tom Stafford and the Space Race (2002). Half of these books are a collection of Soviet-era Russia (USSR) space program books and periodicals written in Russian. Michael Cassutt has characterized the books as the most comprehensive collection about the …

An Investigation Into The Documental History Of Immigrants From Russia And Latin America In The State Of Nebraska, Elena Thomson

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

The research questions in this essay ask whether or not the Nebraska State Archives contains literature in the Russian and Spanish languages. These documents, and others written in English on the same topic, are introduced and analyzed throughout the essay, exploring the history of immigrants from Russia and Latin America. As well as history, the documents delve into the current state of these immigrant groups, and how their traditions have changed Nebraska and continue to influence it today. The essay contains two sections: the first about immigrants from Russia, the second about those from Latin America. At the end of …

Russian L2 Learners' And Teachers' Perceptions Of Learning Affordances, Marina Tsylina, Jose Luis Garrido Rivera, Hadis Ghaedi

Russian Language Journal

The environment offers a variety of resources for language learning and teaching. However, students and teachers might not recognize the same affordances or may perceive them differently. The mismatch between instructors’ and learners’ perceived affordances may result in ineffective use of time for both students and teachers, lower student motivation, and retard the language learning process. The study draws on the ecological approach (van Lier, 2000) to second language acquisition to investigate L2 Russian learners’ and teachers’ perceptions of language learning affordances, i.e., any physical objects, online materials, humans, and other resources which are embedded in the environment, and emerge …

Morphosemantic Integration Of -Ing Anglicisms Into Russian And Kazakh In The Context Of Trilingual Code-Switching, Timur Akishev

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The current dissertation is an attempt to determine and describe the characteristics of the process of linguistic integration of English noun loans into Russian and Kazakh. One of the main objectives that my study was guided by was the analysis of the relationships between or across the linguistic and quantitative parameters of the loans based on the data drawn from the Russian National Corpus, an online database containing multiple examples of using the Russian language. Another important objective of the research conducted was to provide a holistic interpretation to the process of secondary adaptation of the nominal Anglicisms from Russian …

Russian And Ukrainian: Like Two Drops Of Water, Elizabeth Edwards

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

Ukraine and Russia, both in the international spotlight, have similar national languages that are often misrepresented as being entirely mutually intelligible. While both languages do, in fact, have the same lineage, Ukraine has, over time, developed linguistic independence in a distinct language separate from Russian. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has renewed public interest in both the Ukrainian and Russian languages, but there are still stark differences, both socio-politically and linguistically, which are not widely known or appreciated. A brief, historical description of a few lexical, phonological, and orthographic differences between the two languages can illustrate the importance of …

Online Appendix: Who Are(N’T) Our Students?, Dianna Murphy, Hadis Ghaedi

ScholarsArchive Data

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The document is an appendix to the article "Who Are(n’t) Our Students?" by Dianna Murphy, Hadis Ghaedi published in RLJ Vol. 71, No. 3 . It provides high-resolution images which, due to their large size, are not legible in the print edition.

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 …

The Production Of Russian Vowels /I/ And /Ɨ/ By Russian-English Bilingual Children, Evgeniya Maryutina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study is the first to investigate the production of the Russian vowel contrast /i/-/ɨ/ by Russian-English bilingual children living in New York City. This contrast is interesting because the vowel /ɨ/ is not unanimously recognized as an independent phoneme, based on e.g. its limited occurrence and distribution (Kodzasov & Krivnova, 2010; Matusevich, 1976). Additionally, Russian-speaking children acquire /ɨ/ relatively late in production. Therefore, this contrast’s acquisition may be particularly challenging for bilingual children with more limited exposure and variability in their input and is an interesting test case and contribution to the debate regarding the contrast’s phonological status. In …

Acquisition Orders And Instructional Sequences: A Case Study Of Russian Textbooks, Olga Ozhiganova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Previous research on English as a second language has established the linguistic phenomenon of the natural order of morpheme acquisition in which grammatical features are acquired by learners in a specific order. The acquisition of Russian morphosyntax as an L2 had not been established until Gor’s (2019) research. The present study employs Gor’s (2019) findings to examine whether the order in which five Russian morphosyntactic features—case, impersonal sentences, location-direction, aspect, verbs of motion (VoM)—are acquired is reflected in second-year Russian instructional materials by investigating three commonly used textbooks. The results reveal that (1) the documented order in which Russian morphosyntactic …

A Primer For Beginning Russian, Dasha Culic Nisula

Books Written by World Languages and Literatures Faculty

A two week introductory course to the teaching of Russian featuring lessons, exercises, and supplements.

Russian Language Use In The United States: Demographics And Implications, Julie Brock

Posters-at-the-Capitol Presentations

As a large nation covering 1/9 of the Earth’s surface, Russia and its language necessarily draw linguistic attention. Between the time of the Russian Revolution (1917) until now, Russian speakers (both from Russia itself and former Soviet territories) immigrated to the United States in four or five waves. Russian is currently identified as one of the world’s Critical Languages, according to the U.S. State Department. U.S. Census data indicate that Russian language spoken in respondents’ homes increased by 393% between 1980-2010, with just under a million people speaking Russian in their homes in 2011. English language use among this population …

Intertextuality, Aesthetics, And The Digital: Rediscovering Chekhov In Early British Modernism, Sam Jacob

Modernist Short Story Project

Mark Halliday’s poem, “Chekhov,” published in 1992, raises a simple yet profound question regarding the Russian playwright and author, Anton Chekhov: What do we get from Chekhov? Considering the present article’s particular focus, Halliday’s query may be used to ask how Chekhov influenced early modernist writers (circa 1900-1930) from the British literary context. However, when considering the amount of scholarly work devoted to this question, the initial simplicity of Halliday’s inquiry evaporates, giving way to a breadth of complexity, nuance, and ambiguity. Such ambiguity has led scholars attempting to trace the intertextual convergence between Chekhov and the early modernist writers …

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 …

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 …

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

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 …

Using Religious Themes And Content To Affect Cultural Sensitivity In Russian Language Learning, Paul Tristan Gallo

Theses and Dissertations

Specifically oriented towards Russian culture, this study addresses the need in diplomacy for deeper cultural understanding. As research suggests a link between the inclusion of religious perspectives in second language acquisition (SLA) and student motivation and cultural empathy, this study examines how Russian language classrooms could leverage an understanding of Russian religious themes to foster cultural sensitivity. The study invited 24 second-year university students of Russian to complete a previously-validated assessment of cultural sensitivity: the Global Perspectives Inventory (GPI). Divided into a control and a treatment group, the participants also watched a short video depicting a story from Russian history …

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.

Quantifier Spreading In Child Eye Movements: A Case Of The Russian Quantifier Kazhdyj ‘Every’, Irina A. Sekerina, Antje Sauermann

Publications and Research

Extensive cross-linguistic work has documented that children up to the age of 9–10 make errors when performing a sentence-picture verification task that pairs spoken sentences with the universal quantifier every and pictures with entities in partial one-to-one correspondence. These errors stem from children’s difficulties in restricting the domain of a universal quantifier to the appropriate noun phrase and are referred in the literature as quantifier-spreading (q-spreading). We adapted the task to be performed in conjunction with eye-movement recordings using the Visual World Paradigm. Russian-speaking 5-to-6-year-old children (N = 31) listened to sentences like Kazhdyj alligator lezhit v vanne ‘Every alligator …

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

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 …

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

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.

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: 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.