Ukrainian language textbook for beginners/post-beginners - James Wilson

Background and aims

With Oksana Hubina (OH) from the School of English, I will be working on a Ukrainian language course book for students at the beginners’/ post-beginners’ level. The book is aimed at students who take the University of Leeds Ukrainian language modules as well as at ab-initio learners more generally. Besides training basic language skills, it also introduces learners to several aspects of Ukrainian culture. It is a communicative course that draws on authentic language data taken from contemporary Ukrainian language corpora and is supported by accessible grammar descriptions and exercises that test the use of grammar in context.

My specific contribution to the project will be to (1) write the grammar sections, (2) add corpus-based examples (collocations, grammar forms in context, etc.) and (3) provide translations (from Ukrainian to English) for instructions and dialogues.

Methodology and data collection

I will use two large Web-crawled Ukrainian language corpora to identify common collocations relevant to the core vocabulary of the book and select appropriate examples of grammar in context: (1) ukTenTen22 (approx. 7.5 billion words), accessible via Sketch Engine and (2) INTERNET-UA (approx. 250 million words), accessible via IntelliText. Given the language proficiency of the target audience, some of the material from these corpora will need editing before it is integrated into the textbook. I will liaise closely with OH, who will be responsible for editing, in selecting appropriate examples. We plan to keep editing to a minimum in line with the approach taken on the context-based examples presented in A Frequency Dictionary of Russian, published by Routledge (2013), on which I worked with Serge Sharoff (CTS) and Elena Umanskaya.

Expected outcomes, outputs and dissemination

In addition to writing the textbook itself, we plan to give a series of presentations about the methods we will use to produce it. In the first instance, we will look to present at local forums, with the aim of presenting at (inter)national events with a focus on Slavonic linguistics/language pedagogy and potentially writing up one of our papers for publication once we are at a more advanced stage or once the book has been published.

Timescale

The whole of the 2025/26 academic year. S1 = draft chapters + proposal for publishers; S2 = edits/revisions + first draft of the textbook.

Expected impact

As a lesser taught language, Ukrainian has relatively few resources. Our textbook will contribute to the existing pedagogical literature and we believe it is original in its scope owing to the integration of corpus material. In this respect, it will also showcase IntelliText, which was developed at Leeds and has been applied widely in teaching (English, German, Italian, Russian), scholarship and research both locally and (inter)nationally. The project will add a new dimension to my own scholarship on corpus-based language learning, as this will be the first that I have worked with Ukrainian.