Discusses influences on the development of Russian nationalism. Describes the development of an intelligentsia and its relationship with both peasants and rulers. Addresses the influence of French and German political and religious thinkers. Emphasizes that the Napoleonic wars provided both a Russian patriotic bond and exposure of Russia's elite…

This article discusses the issues surrounding which language should be used for instruction in the Ukraine, where Ukrainian, the majority language, has suffered attrition. Also discussed is the choice of a modern foreign language for students in secondary and tertiary systems. (Contains 12 references.) (VWL)

Comparison of language proficiency gains in Russian study abroad in Russia looked at homestay versus dormitory residence. Statistical analysis of the American Council of Teachers of Russian students records database, which contains proficiency data on 2,500 study-abroad participants, was used to compare gains made in speaking, listening, and…

Examines ongoing language reform work in Uzbekistan to see what principles and attitudes Uzbek language policy is based on and what impact it may have on the language situation in the country as a whole. (Author/JL)

Investigated the relationship among identity, affective variables, and achievement in English as a foreign language (EFL). Participants were 135 native Hebrew speakers and 53 native Russian speakers studying advanced EFL at an Israeli university. Results showed that ethnolinguistic identity was a greater predictor of achievement than any of the…

Presents a tribute to Dan Davidson, American Department of Foreign Language's (ADFL) 1997 honoree as an outstanding educator, focusing on Davidson's work to expand Russian studies nationwide and forge ties between U.S. Russianists and Russia itself over the past decades, beginning with the post-Sputnik era. Davidson was able to go beyond the Iron…

Almost since the moment the Berlin Wall crumbled, American schools' interest in teaching Russian did likewise. But precisely because the numbers of Russian learners fell off sharply, Glastonbury and the few other schools that have stuck with the language are finding their students very much in demand. In this article, the author reports how…

To contribute to a better understanding of second language (L2) sentence processing, the present study examines how L2 learners parse temporarily ambiguous sentences containing relative clauses. Results are reported from both off-line and on-line experiments with three groups of advanced learners of Greek whose native languages (L1s) were Spanish,…

This study compares patterns of consonant-to-consonant timing at word boundaries in English and Russian and investigates the roles of transfer and the emergence of linguistic universals in second language (L2) articulation. Native Russian speakers learning English and native English speakers learning Russian produced phrases in English and Russian…

The two chapters translated here from the book "Public Education in Developed Socialist Society" discuss (1) the teaching of the Russian language in the republic of Kirgizia (USSR) and (2) the role that education must play in incorporating non-Russian nationalities such as the Kirgiz people into a common, Soviet national culture. (RM)

Describes the uses for and advantages of a computerized foreign language/ English dictionary. Using Russian as an example, the additional teaching functions such a dictionary could provide include: (1) word frequency; (2) etymological information; (3) word family; (4) tergo listings; (5) synonym listings; (6) thesaurus listings; and (7) literary…

Russian and Soviet studies specialists see long-term threats to the field's continuing strength with the sudden decline of private and public funding. Some potential problems are identified: narrowed language offerings, declining enrollments, and a history of politicization in Soviet studies. The use of Soviet emigres is advocated. (MLW)

Reports the results of a cross-sectional study of 67 short autobiographical essays by U.S. students of Russian at 4 levels. Linguistic measures differentiating the groups included fluency and syntactic fluency, but not accuracy. The article recommends further research into second- and foreign- language learning writing that accounts for different…

Explores problems of three groups of Russian-language students using romanized Cyrillic bibliographic records. Investigates students' ability to keyword search using Russian records romanized according to Library of Congress transliteration tables. Results show that transliteration is one of the factors limiting access by Russian-language students…

Focuses on the similarities and differences between the rhetorical structure of some Slavonic and English scientific texts. The study tests the assumption that scientific discourse has universal features that are language-independent. Results point to differences between the two types of rhetorical patterns resulting from cultural and academic…