Corpus-informed teaching of Russian as L2 with focus on journalistic language

Pavel Gudoshnikov, School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of Leeds

This project aims to develop a body of teaching materials and, ultimately, a short structured course for reading and writing Russian journalistic prose. This will be based on data extracted from the corpus of Lenta.ru texts compiled by Serge Sharoff. The primary focus of the course will be on teaching devices of cohesion and genre/register markers.

Lenta.ru is a popular Russian news outlet. Its house style is typical of mainstream Russian news-reporting.

The course will be aimed at learners in the B1-B2 bracket. The most immediate goal of is to improve their ability to parse and construct simple informative and polemic texts in Russian. The secondary goal is to help them engage with contemporary news-media output while maintaining a measure of critical distance from the text by teaching them to recognise specific linguistic features used for specific rhetorical purposes.  Other goals involve a general push towards closer reading and better research skills, including good practices for independent learning of genre and domain-specific vocabulary.

The course will be composed of three or core blocks focusing on three key subgenres: news-reporting, editorial, and informative article.

The initial phase of the project involves a quantitative analysis of the corpus, aiming to isolate frequently recurring features, with attention paid to function words and grammatical variables, such as word order variations, choices of case, number, gender, tense, aspect, mood, etc. In particular, I hope to isolate some recurring discontinuous features similar in spirit to correlative conjunctions.

The second phase will involve sourcing and, if necessary, adapting suitable texts, isolating the features of interest and developing exercises to be completed before, during and after reading.

The final phase will involve classroom trials with cycles of material adaptation and development of marking schemes.