Slavic Languages and Societies Commons^™

Developing Russian Oral Skills In The Online Environment, Elena Doludenko

Russian Language Journal

The global pandemic due to COVID-19 forced classes to go into online or remote modes in a very short period of time. Instructors teaching languages, including Russian, had to adjust assignments and tasks to continue developing oral skills in the new environment. This paper describes various activities and techniques used in synchronous and asynchronous online Russian classes since March 2020. These activities ensured that L2 students continued practicing Russian in new modalities. In particular, this article discusses the benefits of individual and paired recordings, paired work in Breakout Rooms in Zoom, individual work on pronunciation, and video projects. These activities …

Hybrids 2.0: Forward To A New Normal In Post-Pandemic Language Teaching, William J. Comer, Lynne Debenedette

Russian Language Journal

This article reflects on possible ways of incorporating the practices and tools of pandemic-induced remote teaching into the post-pandemic face-to-face teaching of Russian. We posit that a large number of the tools and practices that face-to-face teachers adopted during the pandemic will continue to be useful and effective for accomplishing fundamental pedagogical imperatives such as curating learners’ access to input and providing opportunities for learners to interact with that input. Nevertheless, we also assert the benefits of synchronous face-to-face language instruction for building community and interaction. We explore ways of intentionally blending practices into new hybrid models of language instruction, …

Raise Your Hand: Online Language And Culture Instruction, Inclusivity, And Critical Pedagogy, Thomas Jesús Garza

Russian Language Journal

The strained pedagogies in the wake of the transition to virtual online delivery of instruction in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, while taxing some instructors’ and students’ patience, have also resulted in reimagined curricula and new opportunities for student engagement and participation in our language and culture courses. This essay presents a rationale for the creation of ecologies of equity and inclusion within online delivery of course content on platforms such as Zoom, including suggestions for creating Breakout Room tasks and activities that encourage critical engagement and dialogue among learners and facilitate the creation of “safe spaces” for open …

Русский Ковидный: Новые Языковые Явления Глобальной Пандемии, Елена Шмелева

Russian Language Journal

Я зык отражает все значимые события, происходящие в обществе, поэтому не удивительно, что так изменившая в 2020 году жизнь множества людей пандемия COVID-19 не могла не найти отражение в языке. Сложился новый глобальный дискурс коронавирусной эпохи – не случайно в разных странах и разных языках, где выбирают слова года, победителями в 2020 году стали такие слова, как коронавирус, маски, локдаун, социальное дистанцирование и др. В статье мы кратко охарактеризуем основные особенности «русского ковидного», обращая особое внимание на новые языковые явления – изменения в лексике (появление новых слов и выражений, рост частотности редких слов, переход терминов в разряд общеупотребительной лексики), новые …

Here, There, And Elsewhere: Reimagining Russian Language And Culture Course Syllabi For Social Justice, Thomas Jesús Garza

Russian Language Journal

The past two decades have witnessed enrollments in American colleges and universities for U.S. residents aged 18 to 24 increase from 35 percent in 2000 to 41 percent in 2018. Within this demographic, those identifying in census data as Hispanic/Latinx increased during the same period from 22 to 36 percent, as Black 31 to 37 percent, as Asian 56 to 59 percent, as Indigenous/Native American 16 to 24 percent, and as bi-or multiracial 38 to 44 percent (Hussar et al. 2020, 125). As the student population of higher education in the United States begins to reflect the national demographic portrait …

Diversity And Inclusion In The Study Abroad Context: Recruiting Data And On-Program Support Initiatives For The Cls Russian Institutes, Jeanette Owen, Nellie Manis

Russian Language Journal

The authors submit this paper in the interest of sharing the perspectives and experiences of practitioners in the field of study abroad and to contribute to the discussion of best practices related to the recruitment, preparation, and support of underrepresented students with examples related to the study of Russian. The authors recognize that further work on study abroad programming for underrepresented students is necessary, and this contribution is intended to foster further discussion across the field.

The Russian Coordinating Conjunctions И And А: Their Meaning, Function, And Pedagogy, Mark J. Elson

Russian Language Journal

This paper is concerned with the systemic status of the coordinating conjunctions и and а in Contemporary Standard Russian. Most previous treatments of и and а have, without comment, viewed them as minimal syntactic units (i.e., words) defined, for systemic purposes, functionally—as equating or likening in the case of и but contrasting or opposing in that of а. However, these treatments, whether intentionally or unwittingly, have left unattended the possibility that и and а, although syntactic units, are more properly defined grammatically (i.e., are systemically characterized by an invariant grammatical meaning of which their functions are derivative).1 At …

From Error Annotation To Quantitative Analysis: Patterns In Russian Language Learning, Irina Kor Chahine, Ekaterina Uetova

Russian Language Journal

Although learner corpus research has been progressively growing into an independent branch of corpus linguistics, the learner corpus cannot yet fully benefit from corpus analysis methods. This is due to several technical obstacles involving data collection, error annotation, and finally, data processing. When it comes to data collection, compared to corpus linguistics, learner corpus is biased because some of the learner corpora are still collected manually: Optical character recognition (OCR) is not yet sophisticated enough to transform a student’s handwritten copy to a digitized text. This fact significantly slows the collection of learner corpora. Furthermore, typed students’ texts present another …

Excerpt From Ключевые Идеи Русской Языковой Картины Мира: The Breadth Of The Russian Soul, Alexei D. Shmelev, Nicole-Marie Konopelko, Translator, Stephen M. Dickey, Preface

Russian Language Journal

In 2005 a collection of articles appeared under the title Ключевые идеи русской языковой картины мира (‘Key Ideas of the Russian Linguistic Worldview’), authored by Anna A. Zalizniak, Irina B. Levontina and Aleksei D. Shmelev and published by the Языки славянской культуры (‘Languages of Slavic Culture’) publishing house in Moscow. The studies in Key Ideas of the Russian Linguistic Worldview were inspired by the work of Anna Wierzbicka, most notably her Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish, German, Japanese (Oxford University Press, 1997). The idea behind the volume is that language communities operate with a ‘linguistic picture …

Review: Llc (Language, Literature, Culture) Commons: Open Resources For Online Teaching Slavic, Jennifer Bown

Russian Language Journal

The web resource LLC (Language, Literature, Culture) Commons: Open Resources for Online Teaching Slavic, created by Shannon Donnally Spasova and Liudmila Klimanova, allows instructors to share quality online materials that can endure over time. LLC Commons organizes a set of online Russian language modules developed primarily by the authors. All of the materials on the website are licensed under a Creative Commons license, allowing instructors to revise, reuse, and redistribute the lessons as long as the authors of the lesson are given credit.

Zoomprov. Improvisation Exercises For Language Learning In Online Classes With Zoom Or Similar Tech For Beginning And Intermediate Learners And Beyond, Mona Eikel-Pohen

Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics - All Scholarship

The improv language exercises in this compilation are chosen from the experience I gathered 20 years ago, but also from the amazing work of Lauren Esposito and Scranton Improv & Comedy that have been more real than anything else to me this past summer, and from Jim Ansaldo, who taught me how to structure improv exercises online. They are organized by level, referring to the Common European Framework of References for Languages. That means, A1 exercises can be conducted at the beginners level but also at all other higher levels, but B2 exercises should not be imposed upon beginners or …

Eternity In Low Earth Orbit: Icons On The International Space Station, Wendy Salmond, Justin Walsh, Alice Gorman

Art Faculty Articles and Research

This paper investigates the material culture of icons on the International Space Station as part of a complex web of interactions between cosmonauts and the Russian Orthodox Church, reflecting contemporary terrestrial political and social aairs. An analysis of photographs from the International Space Station (ISS) demonstrated that a particular area of the Zvezda module is used for the display of icons, both Orthodox and secular, including the Mother of God of Kazan and Yuri Gagarin. The Orthodox icons are frequently sent to space and returned to Earth at the request of church clerics. In this process, the icons become part …

The Forest, The Trees, The Bark, The Pith: An Intensive Look At The Circulation Rates Of Primary Texts In Ten Major Literature Areas At The University Of Oregon Libraries, Jeff D. Staiger

Charleston Library Conference

This poster looks at the circulation rate for literary primary texts, which constitute a unique area of collecting in academic libraries: while they do not in most cases meet immediate research needs, it is assumed that libraries ought to acquire them, for reasons including future research needs, preservation of the cultural record, and the ability of members of the intellectual community to stay current, those these remain primarily tacit. The circulation trends of contemporary literary works in ten areas of literature (English, American, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Latin American, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian) over the past twenty years at the …

The Censors In The Years Of The Calm, Jackson Taylor Jr.

Studies in English

No abstract provided.

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 …

Investigating The Needs Of Foreign Language Learners Of Tuvan, Rossina Soyan

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Where do you start the course design for a minority language? One starting point is identifying and surveying a community of possible learners. This paper explores the needs of learners of Tuvan, a language spoken primarily in the Republic of Tuva, Southern Siberia, Russia. The study was conducted in two steps: an online questionnaire (March 2019) and semi-structured interviews (April 2019). The results showed a limited interest in Tuvan as a foreign language (13 responses) on the one hand, but a long-standing one on the other, more than two decades in some cases. The identified learner needs fell into three …

Radna: The Holy Shrine Of The Multinational Banat Region (Romania), Erika Vass

Journal of Global Catholicism

Radna is the sacral heart of the Banat region in Romania. The shrine has united the Catholics for centuries in veneration of Virgin Mary regardless of their nationality and native language. Roman Catholic Bulgarians, Croatians (called Krashovani), Hungarians, Germans, Roma, Romanians, and Slovakians venerate the Blessed Virgin Mary together, but believers of the Orthodox and Greek Catholic Church also visit the sacred venue. Until the borders changed after the First World War, a great number of pilgrims had visited Radna every year from the region of the Great Hungarian Plain. The pilgrimage may be considered a rite of passage connecting …

Minor Letnica: (Re)Locating The Tradition Of Shared Worship In North Macedonia, Ksenia Trofimova

Journal of Global Catholicism

This paper addresses trajectories of historical and devotional continuity of the annual pilgrimage to a Marian shrine. It analyzes the ways in which traditional worship of the Catholic Church in Letnica (Kosovo)—a major regional sanctuary of the former Yugoslavia—is relocated and replicated in a small chapel of St. Joseph in Skopje (North Macedonia). Both sites have been for a long period of time institutionally connected and shared by followers of different religious traditions (Catholic and Orthodox devotees, and especially by Muslims). Drawing upon fieldwork carried out in Macedonia and Serbia between 2014-2019, I focus on the processes of social construction …

Overview And Acknowledgments, Marc Roscoe Loustau

Journal of Global Catholicism

No abstract provided.

Notes On Translation In The Slavic Field In The Last Twenty Years, Sibelan E.S. Forrester

Russian Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Automatic Keyphrase Extraction From Russian-Language Scholarly Papers In Computational Linguistics, Yves Wienecke

University Honors Theses

The automatic extraction of keyphrases from scholarly papers is a necessary step for many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, including text retrieval, machine translation, and text summarization. However, due to the different grammatical and semantic intricacies of languages, this is a highly language-dependent task. Many free and open source implementations of state-of-the-art keyphrase extraction techniques exist, but they are not adapted for processing Russian text. Furthermore, the multi-linguistic character of scholarly papers in the field of Russian computational linguistics and NLP introduces additional complexity to keyphrase extraction. This paper describes a free and open source program as a proof of …

Review Of La Bella España: El Teatro De Lope De Vega En La Rusia Soviética Y Postsoviética By Veronika Ryjik, Slav N. Gratchev

Modern Languages Faculty Research

There are certain writers whose importance only grows with time, and the longer the distance that separates us from them, the more facets of their genius they demonstrate to us, the readers of the twenty-first century. One of these authors is Lope de Vega. The new book of Veronika Ryjik now makes another major contribution to the scholarship of a great master who was well known and admired in Soviet Russia. It is indeed a serious study and one that fermented in the mind of the scholar for more than ten years – the true symbol of a truly remarkable …

The Problem Of Literary Development In Russian Formalism And Digital Humanities, Basil Lvoff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The interest of this dissertation is how our understanding of literary development—as gradual or revolutionary; self-governed or socio-politically determined; like or unlike biological evolution—informs the status, meaning, and value of literature and literary studies. The dissertation shows how this problem—most pressing in our post-logocentric age—was addressed at the dawn of contemporary literary theory by the Russian Formalists. The latter are compared with Distant Readers, i.e., the Digital Humanists from, or conducting research in dialogue with, the Stanford Literary Lab: Franco Moretti, Matthew Jockers, Ted Underwood, William Benzon, and others.

This dissertation argues that both Russian Formalism and Distant Reading were …

Collection Development Challenges In Slavic & East European Libraries: A Literature Review, Sebastian C. Galbo

School of Information Student Research Journal

The purpose of this paper (a literature review) is threefold. First, it seeks to understand the current landscape of collection development practices within the contexts of academic Slavic and Eastern Europe (SEE) collections. Second, this paper aims to grasp the challenges that impact how librarians devise collection development policies for academic SEE holdings. Third, by drawing on current field research, it investigates how SEE collections are addressing these challenges and sustaining user services. It asks, for example, what tools/resources SEE collections employ to remain vital, relevant, and accessible. Based on these three foci, this paper provides an assessment of the …

The Reactor Room: An Immersive Chernobyl Exhibition, José Vergara

Digital Humanities Curricular Development

The Reactor Room: An Immersive Chernobyl Exhibition is a digital installation featuring the work of students in Professor José Vergara’s course Chernobyl: Nuclear Narratives and the Environment (Spring 2020) at Swarthmore College. Students designed this interactive exhibition to facilitate public engagement with the catastrophe. Students researched topics of their own choosing and produced outward-facing digital projects that investigate diverse aspects of Chernobyl’s cultural, environmental, social, and political consequences: maps that visually trace the radioactive fallout; biographies of key figures who experienced, survived, and perpetrated one of the worst nuclear disasters in history; audio-based works that engage with the sounds, silences, …

Chernobyl: Nuclear Narratives And The Environment (Russ/Litr 43) Syllabus, José Vergara

Digital Humanities Curricular Development

What really happened on April 26, 1986? This course will introduce students to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, its consequences, and its representations across a range of cultures. Texts will be drawn from (non-)fiction, poetry, film, TV, video games, VR, and other media, as we consider the labyrinth of Chernobyl's mythology through a comparative lens and as a global phenomenon. Culture meets ecology, science, history, and politics. Fields trips and guest speakers. The final class project will involve an installation at McCabe Library.

The Interwoven Existences Of Official Catholicism And Magical Practice In The Lived Religiosity Of A Transylvanian Hungarian Village, Cecília Sándor

Journal of Global Catholicism

During the last five years I have been doing field research in a Transylvanian Hungarian village, Sânsimion (Hu: Csíkszentsimon). I present my research on this religiously homogenous, Catholic community’s worldview. Based on interviews conducted with members of the village’s various age groups, I map religious and magical knowledge passed down through the generations, using the theoretical frame of collective memory and religious transmission. Second, I highlight two different but coexisting “constructions of reality” in this rural community. By “constructions of reality,” I mean interpretations of reality expressed in narrative discourses and local magical practices that are closely and inextricably interwoven …

Rockin' The Church: Vernacular Catholic Musical Practices, Kinga Povedak

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article focuses on the unique dimensions of lived or vernacular Catholicism through the analysis of contemporary congregational music in Hungary. Looking at the musical lives of Hungarian Roman Catholics from the late 1960s to contemporary times can provide us with new understandings of the theological contents and aesthetics, as well as the vernacular religiosity of the community. Christian popular music appeared behind the Iron Curtain relatively early, in 1967 when the first “beat mass” was created and introduced at Budapest. The early Christian popular music sounded astonishingly similar to the songs of the American Folk Mass Movement of the …

Longings, Letters And Prayers: Visitor's Books At Hungarian Marian Shrines, Krisztina Frauhammer

Journal of Global Catholicism

The following study seeks to show the flow of contemporary rituals associated with pilgrimage shrines. I will consider how visitor’s books placed on display at shrine churches are being utilized in the modern context by pilgrims and tourists alike. Requests, words of thanksgiving, and testimony are coupled with an honest, reflexive style that lends to the formation of these individualized prayers. These prayers are original, specific and peculiar as they follow patterns that are informal in nature. These prayers allow pilgrims to initiate contact with the Transcendent through the act and practice of writing. An idiosyncratic form of sacred communication …

Introduction: Consumer Contexts And Divine Presences In Hungarian Catholicism, Marc Roscoe Loustau

Journal of Global Catholicism

Introduction to Hungarian Catholicism: Living Faith Across Diverse Social and Intellectual Contexts, highlighting both the specific contributions of the articles to the study of Hungarian Catholicism and situating them within the broad sweep of Hungarian and Catholic Studies.