This article suggests that to better prepare students for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) oral proficiency interview, it is up to instructors to see that these students are better prepared in oral, creative speech. Bridging exercises between dialogue memorization and personalized situations can be used to help…

Examines the implications of the ACTFL Provisional Proficiency Guidelines for the writing curriculum. Argues that the functions identified in the guidelines should be practices in writing as well as in speech. Discusses error correction techniques and presents examples of writing assignments in Russian that elicit advanced-level functions. (SED)

Reports on the results of two surveys of college-level instruction in Russian, conducted in 1980 and 1983, designed to measure to what degree phonetics is included as an integral part of the program. The majority of the schools in both surveys indicated a casual attitude towards teaching pronunciation and an overall downward trend in the role of…

Presents the results of a study that supports the premise that children should read literature written for children in other countries to increase their knowledge and understanding of other cultures. Includes a bibliography of Russian children's literature. (AEA)

Provides annotations for 25 books containing stories from and about countries that are now part of the Soviet Union. Suggests that they can help children become aware of cultures other than their own. (FL)

The third in a series of articles presenting annotations of books from and about the Soviet Union. (FL)

Discusses English reading texts used in the Soviet Union, which are English translations of Russian literature. Notes that such literature divides attention between the traditional and the progressive elements of Soviet culture. (DF)

By comparing Russian and English on the phonological and grammatical levels, guidelines are offered for teachers of English as a second language to Russian students. (CFM)

Presents the results of a study on the Mofet system (Israel), founded by immigrant teachers in 1991 as an effort to educate Russian immigrant children. Argues that although the success of the system is linked to the general education system's failure to meet immigrants' needs, it does not express Russian immigrant's desire for socio-cultural…

Explains a process drama which was constructed to help high school juniors better understand country life in Russia, and to help them empathetically bond with the characters in the short stories they were assigned to read. Describes how this role-playing challenged the false notion held by students that serfdom in Russia was similar to slavery in…

Investigates whether the aspect-before-tense hypothesis accounts for the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology in child second language English. Addressed whether early uses of tense-aspect inflections can be analyzed as a spell-out of semantic/aspectual features of verbs. Data are from a longitudinal study of an 8-year-old Russian-speaking child…

Discusses the role of the infinitive in Russian verbal morphology, and points out the advantage of the single-stem system of analyzing and presenting Russian verbs. (32 references) (Author/OD)

Examines the general challenge of proficiency-oriented methodology as applied specifically to beginning Russian-as-a-Second-Language teaching. (Author/OD)

Discusses the "Russian Dynamic Hand," a working prototype for introducing the Russian writing and sound system that has been available to students at Louisiana State University since September 1988. The project's evolution is discussed from an initial graphics-centered IBM prototype to a Macintosh version enhanced by an audio component.…

Discusses an article written by three Soviet teachers who analyze studies conducted in the area of foreign language teaching, particularly the teaching of Russian. Their focus is on the methodological principles of an approach that integrates the teaching of the four skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing). (CFM)