Slavic Languages and Societies Commons^™

Full Issue

Russian Language Journal

No abstract provided.

Diversity, Equity, Access, And Inclusion: Lessons For The Russian Language Classroom, Colleen Lucey

Russian Language Journal

The current special issue tackles some of the most difficult pedagogical questions facing Russian language instructors today. As the articles illustrate, there is a growing awareness of the possibilities of critical pedagogy to dismantle existing hierarchies and to create inclusive spaces for learners. The authors included in this special issue provide us with what the field has long needed yet direly lacked: scholarship that offers both theoretical and practical guidance to integrate diversity, equity, access, and inclusion (DEAI) in curricula and study abroad programming. A number of the authors turn, rightfully so, to existing research by foreign-language specialists who have …

Who Are(N’T) Our Students? The Gender And Ethnoracial Distribution Of U.S. Bachelor’S Degrees In Russian Language And Literature Over Twenty Years, From 1999–2000 To 2018–2019, Dianna Murphy, Hadis Ghaedi

Russian Language Journal

This article is a report on the gender and race or ethnicity of students who earned bachelor’s degrees in Russian language and literature in the United States over a twenty-year period, from 1999–2000 to 2018–2019, as either a first or second major (N = 9,161). This study complements national data available through organizations such as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which, through the Humanities Indicators project (http://www.humanitiesindicators.org), publishes information on the gender and ethnoracial distribution of bachelor’s degrees in languages other than English (LOTEs) together but not for individual languages (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, n.d.). This …

Rectifying Wikipedia Racial Bias In A Russian Language Classroom, Veronika Trotter, Svitlana Melnyk

Russian Language Journal

Over the last decade, minority representation has emerged as a subject of critical self-reflection in the field of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (SEEES), prompting discussions that have centered on both the limited participation of minority populations within the community of SEEES scholars and students and the relative lack of attention that minority communities receive in SEEES teaching and research. Efforts to grapple with both issues became more urgent in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and the massive protests for racial justice throughout the United States and beyond. Major centers for SEEES teaching and research have organized well-attended …

Teaching And Learning Indigenous Languages Of The Russian Federation, Hilah Kohen, Irina Sadovina, Tetyana Dzyadevych, Dylan Charter, Anna Gomboeva, Lenore A. Grenoble, Jessica Kantarovich, Rossina Soyan

Russian Language Journal

On March 20, 2021, one of my students sent a message through his college network: “Happy New Year! Happy Naýryz! Наурыз құтты бол- сын! Naýryz qutty bolsyn! S Vesennim prazdnikom Nauryz! ... Remember to celebrate with friends and family (family meaning chosen, adoptive, or biological, etc.)!” This student grew up in a Spanish-speaking foster family and recently, after a DNA test, discovered his ancestral roots in Bashkiria, Tatarstan, and Kazakhstan. He now wants to learn more about his origins, and he is looking for sources to learn about non-Russian languages and cultures in the Russian Federation (RF) and former USSR. …

Implementing Inclusive Secondary Russian Language Exchange Programs, Anna Stewart, Rebecca Berman, Emily Olmstead, Ashlynn Cobb, Emily Matts Henry

Russian Language Journal

This discussion is a case study of the National Security Language Initiative for Youth (NSLI-Y) program’s overseas and virtual Russian language offerings. The study also provides considerations and examples for embedding diversity, equity, and inclusion into the program design. Special attention is given to identifying Russian language opportunities for American high school students, expanding accessibility, centering program materials on inclusion, and embedding perspectives of the robust regional diversity within the Russian-speaking world into the NSLI-Y program. While the NSLI-Y program partners with many organizations in various locations, examples provided here focus on NSLI-Y programs implemented by American Councils for International …

Review: Da!: A Practical Guide To Russian Grammar, Erik Houle

Russian Language Journal

The Russian contribution to the Routledge Concise Grammars series is Da!: A Practical Guide to Russian Grammar by Tatiana Filosova. Different from the reference grammars more-advanced students and scholars of Russian may turn to, this book’s intended audience is the less-experienced language learner. Those familiar with the first edition know that within each of the book’s thirty-one chapters, the author suggests the relevance of each chapter’s content according to three levels of proficiency: elementary (referred to as level one), lower intermediate (level two), and upper intermediate (level three). Each level is given a description based on approximate equivalents with and …

Review: Russian In Plain English: A Very Basic Russian Starter For Complete Beginners, Veta Chitnev

Russian Language Journal

Natalia Parker’s Russian in Plain English: A Very Basic Russian Starter for Complete Beginners is designed for beginning students and independent learners who are not familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet. The textbook’s primary aim is to help students develop skills in reading aloud in Russian with correct pronunciation. The textbook is divided into ten units. Each unit centers on particular letters and sounds rather than on a specific theme. Every unit includes an objective (with the title “What’s the Plan”), information on Russian letters and the sounds they denote, reading exercises, speaking activities that can be used individually or in …

Review: “The Nose”: A Stylistic And Critical Companion To Nikolai Gogol’S Story, Sara Jo Powell

Russian Language Journal

Ksana Blank’s companion to Gogol’s “The Nose” is an excellent new resource for students of Russian language and literature. The book consists of two sections: the first, a series of annotations to the story’s text, and the second, several short essays on a wide range of related topics. Finally, readers are provided with a carefully selected bibliography of secondary sources, which will be particularly valuable for those new to Gogol research and criticism.

Full Issue

Russian Language Journal

No abstract provided.

Mayakovsky On The Land, Ludmila Lavine

Faculty Journal Articles

It is surprising that the poet whose self-proclaimed mission was to give city streets a language turned to publicizing farming collectives. No less noteworthy is the poet of internationalism working on the ethnocentric Crimea project of advertising Jewish agrarian communities. This paper addresses Mayakovsky’s collaboration on the film Evrei na zemle (Jews on the Land, 1927), and his poems ““Evrei (Tovarishcham iz OZETa)” (“Jew [To Comrades from OZET],” 1926) and “‘Zhid’” (“‘Yid’,” 1928). I argue that in these works the poet reshuffles the svoi-chuzhoi dichotomy. While using the Moses story of exile and liberation, the poet both domesticates the Jew …

Using Authentic Online Resources In Russian For Stem Coursework For Novice Through Superior Level Learners, Molly T. Blasing

Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Publications

This article makes a case for incorporating STEM content into Russian language courses at the Novice through Superior levels of proficiency. The author presents models of asynchronous learning activities based on authentic online resources developed for a Russian for STEM pilot course taught during the COVID-19 pandemic. These lessons can be employed in online or face-to-face courses to prepare students to speak, read, write, and understand the language of STEM fields in Russian.

Belief In The Unbelievable: Yakov Druskin And Chinari Metaphysics, Patrick D. Powers

Honors Papers

This project focuses on the philosophy of Yakov Druskin and its applicability as a lens through which to examine the metaphysical and religious elements of chinari literature. Formed in Leningrad at the dawn of the Soviet Union, the group of authors and philosophers known as the chinari has long been recognized as an important component of the Russian avant-garde. However, the role of religion and spirituality in their works remains under-examined, despite the fact that the group featured a prolific religious philosopher, Yakov Druskin. By exploring a selection of Druskin’s philosophical concepts and applying them to major chinari texts—Daniil Kharms’ …

Embodied Performance As Queer Theatre Historiography: Translation, Gender, Identity, And Temporalities In Mikhail Kuzmin's The Dangerous Precaution, Keenan Shionalyn

All Master's Theses

The “World of Art” and “The Tower,” two groups of symbolist artists in St. Petersburg at the turn of the 20^th century, are often noted for their contributions to queer art in poetry, literature, and the visual arts. However, the theatrical record has yet to acknowledge the significant contributions by these groups, largely ignoring their queer dramatic writings. Mikhail Kuzmin, a notable contributor in both groups of symbolists, is recognized for having contributed music to Meyerhold and Blok’s The Puppet Show but is less known for his multitude of plays. Seeking to remedy this problem, I examine one of …

Teacher Cultural Competency And The Effect On Slavic Student Performance, Erin Marston

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

Student demographic data in today’s elementary and secondary schools have shown an increase in the numbers of diverse students in classrooms across the United States. This change in classroom demographics has established the need for changes to both the classroom educational environment and the preparation of our teachers. Research supports a few documented ways teachers can support both their student experiences and academic performance. Culturally competent teachers, cultural humility, and culturally relevant pedagogy are a few of the ways educators can adapt to the change in student demographics. Linking the literature to these findings will help provide an overview of …

Review: Acquiring The Major Speech Functions In Russian: For Intermediate And Advanced-Level Students, Olha Tytarenko

Russian Language Journal

Acquiring the Major Speech Functions in Russian is designed to help Russian learners build communicative skills related to major speech situations such as greetings, requests, invitations, expressing gratitude, and so on. The volume is built around various sets of scenarios from everyday life to help students understand and appreciate the cultural and social context of various speech situations and equips learners with the necessary vocabulary and background knowledge to participate effectively in a given speech act.

Review: A Reader’S Companion To Mikhail Bulgakov’S “The Master And Margarita, Daniel Brooks

Russian Language Journal

Although Mikhail Bulgakov’s classic The Master and Margarita has become an inevitable fixture of Russian literature survey courses, it can nevertheless present a challenge even for seasoned instructors. As the text repeatedly slips between locales, historical periods, and narrative voices, Bulgakov’s novel seems more and more like a world unto itself. In my experience, there always proves to be something in this world—rewritten Gospels, a moving romance, the gun-toting cat—that will draw undergraduates in. And yet, when a tight syllabus gives me but four classes to tackle the novel’s elaborate system of leitmotifs, allusions, and historical realia, I feel like …

Развитие Межкультурных Коммуникативных Компетенций В Условиях Виртуальной Учебной Программы: Трудности И Результаты, Лилия Ерушкина, Екатер Ина Смирнова, Анна Нгома

Russian Language Journal

К настоящему времени Национальный исследовательский Нижегородский государственный университет им. Н.И. Лобачевского (далее – Университет Лобачевского) имеет достаточно успешный опыт организации и реализации программы CLS (Critical Language Scholarship) Американских Советов по международному образованию (далее - программа), направленной на интенсивное изучение иностранных языков и погружение в культуру страны изучаемого языка.

Transliterated title: Razvitie mezhkul’turnikh kommunikativnikh navykov v usloviiakh virtual’noi uchebnoi programmy: trudnosti i resul’taty

Translated Title: The development of cross-cultural communication skills through a virtual study program: Challenges and lessons

Abstract: This article describes the experience of designing and implementing a Russian as a foreign language distance learning program for American students …

Review: Russian For All Occasions: A Russian-English Dictionary Of Collocations And Expressions, Jason Strudler

Russian Language Journal

Russian for All Occasions is an ambitious book that places itself somewhere between a bilingual thematic dictionary and a grammar textbook, while covering an impressively wide range of linguistic contexts. Its authors describe it as “a new type of dictionary” (xxvi) intended to aid learners of Russian in comprehending and constructing idiomatic speech. Theoretically, the project is rooted in the concept of the “communicative fragment” as defined by Boris Gasparov—the idea that indivisible combinations of words, rather than individual words, “provide speakers with the base units for the mnemonic ‘lexicon’ of their language” (xxvi). With this theory in mind, the …

Review: Unlocking Russian Pronunciation: A Supplementary Multimedia Mini-Course In Phonetics Based On Famous Russian Songs, Irina Kogel

Russian Language Journal

Kimberly DiMattia’s Unlocking Russian Pronunciation provides a much-needed supplement to the instruction of phonetics currently available in most Russian textbooks. Combining insights gained from academic studies of phonetics in the tradition of Elena Bryzgunova and Irina Odintsova, with a thoroughly modern approach to multimedia-driven instruction, Unlocking Russian Pronunciation presents the topic in a straightforward and approachable manner. The mini course consists of a textbook and instructional videos, which introduce learners to a hybrid Russian transcription system that aims to make explicit the rules of Russian phonetics. DiMattia’s system is designed to be used as a supplemental resource at any level …

Review: The Art Of Teaching Russian, Olga Mukhortova

Russian Language Journal

The Art of Teaching Russian, a recent volume on Russian language research, teaching practices, and first-hand experiences in constructing a Russian college course, could become the tabletop book for every Russian scholar teaching in North America. University professors, high school teachers, Russian department chairs, deans, and, especially, graduate students will find it not only professionally engaging but also beneficial in several other ways since the book provides brilliant observations on the last two decades of the Russian field.

Full Issue

Russian Language Journal

No abstract provided.

Review: Quantitative Approaches To The Russian Language, Olesya Kisselev

Russian Language Journal

The volume edited by Mikhail Kopotev, Olga Lyashevskaya, and Arto Mustajoki is a testament to the reinvigorated interest in quantitative approaches to the study of the Russian language that has marked the past decade and a half. The trend, largely prompted and sustained by the widespread availability of large and well-annotated corpora, that is, digital collections of linguistic data (Kopotev and Mustajoki, 2008), is on full display in the edited volume. The methods and instruments featured in the collection are overwhelmingly corpus-based; however, many of the studies described in the papers showcase how various approaches to the analysis of language …

Introduction, Thomas Jesús Garza, Robert Reynolds

Russian Language Journal

On behalf of the editorial team of Russian Language Journal (RLJ), we are pleased to present this volume of RLJ dedicated to “Digital Humanities and Russian Language Teaching.” As digital humanities (DH) programs and materials enter their third decade in the academy, it is fitting to present here a snapshot of the many and varied applications of digital technologies in the teaching and research of Russian language and culture. The articles in this volume represent the breadth of DH endeavors in our field and serve as exemplars of the aspirations and potential that the future of digital technologies in …

Russian’S Most Frequent Words And Implications For Vocabulary Instruction, William J. Comer

Russian Language Journal

In the field of teaching English as a second language (ESL), vocabulary studies have grown in prominence since the development of the General Service List (West 1953). This list sought to define the most common and useful words in English to provide a focus for teachers in instruction and for learners in developing their language proficiency. Since then, the development of electronic language corpora and concordance software has greatly expanded the ESL field’s capacity for studying vocabulary frequency and usage (Dang 2020). For example, researchers have tried to determine vocabulary size (i.e., how many of the most frequent words) a …

Digital Humanities, Access, And The Teaching Of Russian Language And Culture, Irene Krasner, Thomas Jesús Garza

Russian Language Journal

In their introduction to the January 2020 issue of the PMLA dedicated to varieties of Digital Humanities (DH), Booth and Posner (2020) describe the “interdisciplinary collaboration,” “technical experimentation,” and the promotion of “public engagement and humanistic knowledge and understanding” that DH offers scholars and practitioners (10). They go on to reflect on the past two decades of research and practice in the expansion of DH through information studies, libraries, and departments of English. In a related manner, it is our intention to provide both an overview of the history of DH in academia generally, and also its applications to the …

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 …

To Opi Or Not To Opi: Proficiency-Oriented Instruction And Assessment In U.S. University-Level Russian Programs, Oleksandra Wallo, Molly Godwin-Jones

Russian Language Journal

Back in 1991, Thompson claimed that the impact of the proficiency movement on how Russian was taught in the United States had resulted in something more akin to Soviet glasnost rather than perestroika. She meant that while the introduction of ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines and an emphasis on functional ability in a foreign language spurred much discussion in the Russian teaching profession in the 1980s, these developments did not lead to “the actual restructuring of curricula and assessment along functional lines” (375). Thompson mentioned several obstacles to the adoption of the proficiency-based approach for Russian teaching at that time, including …

Student Engagement In A Remote Language Learning Environment: The Case Of Ukrainian, Olena Sivachenko, Alla Nedashkivska

Russian Language Journal

This paper explores student perceptions of engagement in remote first-year, second-year, and third-year Ukrainian as a foreign language courses at a postsecondary institution. It examines student engagement at five levels: behavioral, emotional, cognitive, agentic, and social. This exploration of engagement, using the case of Ukrainian, supports the view of engagement as a multidimensional concept in which the various levels are interconnected and influence one another. The article provides pedagogical advice that is relevant not only to the context of remote instruction.

Service-Provider Virtual Exchange As A Viable Alternative To Face-To-Face Speaking Practice: Data From Second- And Third-Year Russian Learners, Liudmila Klimanova, Valentina Vinokurova

Russian Language Journal

In the context of emergency remote language teaching during the pandemic, the biggest challenge for instructors has been to continue providing learners with opportunities to practice speaking and comprehension skills. Service provider virtual exchange (SPVE) platforms, such as Conversifi, Boomalang, TalkAbroad, iTalki, and LinguaMeeting have the potential to enrich the online learning experience by offering paid videoconferencing sessions with native-speaking language coaches at the students’ convenience. Research shows that regular videoconferencing with native-speaking peers may improve speaking ability (Saito and Akiyama 2017) and foster the development of intercultural competence (Tecedor and Vasseur 2020). This paper will discuss a pilot implementation …