This study investigated the role of cross-linguistic similarity in the acquisition of Russian initial stop contrasts by Chinese learners, addressing two specific research questions: (1) How similar are Russian voiced stops to Mandarin stops for Chinese learners?; and (2) How can the speech learning model (SLM) be applied to account for the…

In the article the concept of "a family reading" is analyzed, the significance of " the family reading" model is disclosed, the role of grandparents in the formation of the child's personality is revealed. The goal of the article is to point out the possibility of improving the reading culture in the case of an awareness of the…

Based on oral and written testimony of pupils and teachers, this essay examines the lived educational experience of the school-age cohort of children in Stalin's Russia from 1931 to 1945. The state alone determined the structure and curricula of the nation's schools. However, Soviet youngsters, their parents, and teachers responded to the center's…

In this commentary, the author stresses that reading habits in Russia have changed since the Soviet era, and the more intellectual journals and magazines in particular have lost their importance. Audiences for books and magazines have fragmented, and there are fewer sources of commonly shared information and ideas than was true a few decades ago.…

It is acknowledged that the value of reading has gone down in today's Russian society, and this is rated as unequivocally negative. Instead of "the most well-read country in the world," Russia is now called a "society of TV viewers" by the some observers; it is not a nation of independent thinkers but passive objects of the…

Practically no one will dispute that the future of Russia depends on the successfulness of the multifaceted modernization of Russian society, a task that cannot be confined solely to the socioeconomic sphere. The most fundamental task is that of changing the societal system of values and institutions. If Russia is to modernize successfully, the…

This paper considers the work of the Russian social philosopher and cultural theorist, Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin as a source of understanding for those involved in action learning. Drawing upon data gathered over two years during the evaluation of 20 action learning sets in the north of England, we will seek to work with the ideas of Bakhtin to…

On 28 November 2006 Russia observes the one-hundredth anniversary of Dmitrii Sergeevich Likhachev. By an edict of President V.V. Putin 2006 has been designated the year of D.S. Likhachev. A scientist of encyclopedic scope and a renowned researcher into Old Russian literature, Academician Likhachev became, starting in the second half of the 1980s,…

The "ISSS Annual Conference Proceedings" is a peer-reviewed professional publication published once a year following the annual conference. (Individual papers contain references.) [For the 2009 proceedings, see ED504973.]