Dynamic Teaching of Russian: Games and Gamification of Learning explores the theory and practice of gamification in language education, with a special focus on Russian, offering an in-depth theoretical account of the psychology of games and their practical application to language teaching. This edited collection brings together diverse perspectives from an international pool of contributors. Topics covered include hands-on game-like activities, play, and games to enrich the Russian-language classroom that can be used with both adult and young Russian-language learners worldwide. The chapters use case studies to showcase innovative approaches that can be used in the language classroom to both motivate learners and improve the outcomes of teaching Russian. This book will appeal to lecturers, tutors, teachers, and all other educators of Russian in subject areas of Russian studies, Slavonic studies, language learning, and foreign language acquisition.

The Art of Teaching Russian offers Russian-language practitioners current research, pedagogy, and specific methodologies for teaching the Russian language and culture in the twenty-first century. With contributions from the leading professionals in the field, this collection covers the most important aspects of teaching the Russian language.

Task-Based Instruction for Teaching Russian as a Foreign Language presents the most recent developments in the field of task-based language teaching (TBLT) and highlights impactful research-based instructional practices of applying TBLT for the teaching of Russian. This comprehensive volume extends the current understanding of the nature and role of tasks in course development, authenticity in task design, the role of the instructor in TBLT, teaching culture through TBLT, the intersection of complex morphology and explicit grammar instruction with task-based approaches, collaborative interaction within TBLT, and technology-mediated tasks. This resource focuses on the unique set of factors and challenges that arise when applying TBLT in the instruction of Russian and other morphologically rich languages. This edited volume will be of interest to teachers of Russian as well as researchers in Russian language acquisition, language pedagogy, and Slavic applied linguistics.

Teaching Russian Creatively With and Beyond the Textbook is a collection of pedagogical narratives that promotes impactful approaches to teaching Russian as a Foreign Language (RFL) when supplementing or going beyond a specific textbook. With the lightning pace of modern news, social media, and technology, textbooks quickly become outdated and as a response to these rapid changes, this edited volume showcases a wide range of approaches to teaching RFL with and beyond traditional textbooks. The reader will find many creative ideas and solid practical advice from colleagues who have experimented with task- based language teaching, corpus-based learning, drama-based pedagogy, community-engaged pedagogy, and technology-mediated language learning, while incorporating authentic materials and turning them into living textbooks. The book will be a useful resource for Russian instructors and language departments interested in engaging their students with creative and unique courses.

Student-Centered Approaches to Russian Language Teaching looks at how the field of Russian language pedagogy has evolved in recent years due to advances in technology along with shifts in attitudes to language pedagogy, and how the pandemic has compounded and accelerated these changes. This edited collection brings together different perspectives from the field of Russian language pedagogy. With pedagogical conversations now centered around students and their needs, as well as the evolving role of the teacher in the 21st century, this volume highlights the diverse ways in which instructional practices have evolved, making curriculum and assessment more student-centered and Russian language learning more engaging. The collection will be of interest to current and future instructors of Russian as a foreign or additional language who wish to diversify their instruction, as well as students of Russian language pedagogy and second language learning and teaching.

Russian as a Heritage Language: From Research to Classroom Applications brings together linguistically and pedagogically oriented research traditions in a comprehensive review of current Russian heritage language (HL) studies. Divided into three parts, the collection offers a variety of frameworks and approaches spanning research on HL speakers’ linguistic and pragmatic competence, literacy development, and sociocultural characteristics of Russian in diaspora. Presenting a wide range of new empirical findings, the volume explores topics at the forefront of HL studies, from assessment of HL learners’ linguistic competence and language attitudes to research on communities and institutional affordances impacting HL acquisition and maintenance. Each chapter connects current research with specific classroom applications, presenting Russian as a global language in various sociopolitical and majority-language contexts. Combining methodological rigor with theoretical insights across diverse areas of language study, Russian as a Heritage Language advances the field of HL pedagogy and serves as essential reading for HL educators and researchers as well as for linguists studying bilingualism.

Hong Kong has been a unique society from its establishment as a political region separate from mainland China in the nineteenth century under British colonial rule until the present day as a special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China. A hub of interregional and international migration, it has been the temporary and long-term home of people belonging to many racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. This book examines the evolution of the community established by clergy and congregants of the Russian Orthodox Church. This community was first developed in the 1930s and then revived after a hiatus of over two decades from the 1970s to the 1990s with the founding of the Orthodox Parish of Apostles Saints Peter and Paul (OPASPP) at the turn of the twenty-first century. This study demonstrates how the OPASPP has become a vital provider of knowledge about Russian language and culture as well as a religious institution serving both heritage and convert believers. The community formed by and around the OPASPP is important to foster Sino-Russian relations based on individual-to-individual contact and mutual exposure to Chinese and Russian cultures in a region of China which allows spiritual and social diversity with minimal political constraints.