How can teachers of Russian language deliver student-centered communicatively oriented instruction and also provide learners with opportunities and time for significant work on grammar and morphology? In the webinar we will consider the roles played in language instruction by input, vocabulary and grammar, and explore ways of incorporating grammar teaching into communicatively focused language practice. Our activities take the learner from the first encounter with new language input through focused work on vocabulary to a structured introduction of grammar via scaffolded communicative student-student interaction.Teachers participating in the webinar will receive guidelines for creating and sequencing communicative activities, as well as a set of materials that implement this approach.
Link to the webinar recording
Handouts
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About the Presenters
William Comer currently serves as Associate Professor of Russian and Director of the Russian Flagship Program at Portland State University, where he has worked since 2014. He received his PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992. From 1992-2014, he worked at the University of Kansas where he taught Russian language and culture and coordinated the Russian language program, training and supervising graduate teaching assistants. His current research work focuses on the learning and teaching of Russian, especially in the areas of reading comprehension, and grammar instruction. He has published numerous articles in national journals including the Slavic and East European Journal, Russian Language Journal and Foreign Language Annals.
His pedagogical edition of Viktoria Tokareva’s short story A Day without Lying (Slavica, 2008) was awarded the prize for Best Book in Language Pedagogy by American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages in 2010. In August 2009 he won the University of Kansas W.T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence. He is one of the four co-authors of Mezhdu nami (www.mezhdunami.org), an online, open-access textbook for elementary Russian. Ме́жду на́ми incorporates principles of communicative and task-based language teaching. The authors have organized the language input, explanations and activities using an inductive approach to learning Russian, and stressing the importance of having learners’ comprehend the language input before they engage in producing meaningful output.
Lynne deBenedette is Senior Lecturer in Russian at Brown University, where she has coordinated the program in Russian language since 1995. She was educated at Middlebury College and the University of Michigan, and has taught previously at the Middlebury Russian School and Wayne State University. At Brown her work has encompassed teaching introductory-advanced Russian and introductory Czech, supervising and training graduate student instructors of Russian language, and co-teaching the methodology seminar for graduate students in foreign language departments. In 2002 she collaborated with colleagues to establish Russian, Spanish and French versions of the online intercultural exchange “Cultura” (originally developed at MIT for French. In 2010 she received the university's John Rowe Workman Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Humanities. She is also one of the co-leaders of the university's summer abroad program Brown in Petersburg.
Her interests involve the learning and teaching of Russian, including curriculum design and program articulation, teaching and assessing intercultural awareness, the role of grammar in language instruction, and the professional development of graduate students. She is co-author, with William J. Comer, Alla Smyslova and Jonathan Perkins, of an open-access online textbook of first year Russian, Между нами (Between You and Me): An Interactive Introduction to Russian (2015).
His pedagogical edition of Viktoria Tokareva’s short story A Day without Lying (Slavica, 2008) was awarded the prize for Best Book in Language Pedagogy by American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages in 2010. In August 2009 he won the University of Kansas W.T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence. He is one of the four co-authors of Mezhdu nami (www.mezhdunami.org), an online, open-access textbook for elementary Russian. Ме́жду на́ми incorporates principles of communicative and task-based language teaching. The authors have organized the language input, explanations and activities using an inductive approach to learning Russian, and stressing the importance of having learners’ comprehend the language input before they engage in producing meaningful output.
Lynne deBenedette is Senior Lecturer in Russian at Brown University, where she has coordinated the program in Russian language since 1995. She was educated at Middlebury College and the University of Michigan, and has taught previously at the Middlebury Russian School and Wayne State University. At Brown her work has encompassed teaching introductory-advanced Russian and introductory Czech, supervising and training graduate student instructors of Russian language, and co-teaching the methodology seminar for graduate students in foreign language departments. In 2002 she collaborated with colleagues to establish Russian, Spanish and French versions of the online intercultural exchange “Cultura” (originally developed at MIT for French. In 2010 she received the university's John Rowe Workman Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Humanities. She is also one of the co-leaders of the university's summer abroad program Brown in Petersburg.
Her interests involve the learning and teaching of Russian, including curriculum design and program articulation, teaching and assessing intercultural awareness, the role of grammar in language instruction, and the professional development of graduate students. She is co-author, with William J. Comer, Alla Smyslova and Jonathan Perkins, of an open-access online textbook of first year Russian, Между нами (Between You and Me): An Interactive Introduction to Russian (2015).
