Introduction

Diverse Russian focuses on the development of speaking, reading, listening, and writing. The textbook is designed to help students attain or solidify Intermediate level proficiency based on the ACTFL scale, or move to a higher sublevel within the Intermediate range (i.e. from Intermediate Low to Intermediate Mid or from Intermediate Mid to Intermediate High). It can be used to supplement existing Intermediate-level textbooks or as a main textbook in a listening, reading, and conversation course. Students will be exposed to a wide range of cultural information, gaining a deeper understanding and appreciation of the diversity within the Russian-speaking communities around the world. As a result, it will help develop students’ intercultural competency, equipping them with the knowledge and skills to engage with Russian speakers from different backgrounds and cultures and navigate cross-cultural interactions with confidence and sensitivity.

Our approach to the textbook draws from several pedagogical approaches. The focus will be not only on proficiency development, but also on gaining intercultural competence, which follows naturally from the theme of the textbook. Because the book highlights a variety of cultures, it also includes some aspects of translanguaging. The reading and listening texts that form a significant part of the book reflect the fact that its basis is content, and grammar is included only as needed from the content. This is balanced, however, with each chapter’s lexical focus, with vocabulary expansion as a major goal. In addition, the textbook offers learners opportunities to improve their language skills by engaging them in meaningful tasks and collaborative projects. These tasks and projects are designed to help students achieve specific communicative goals that align with themes and topics covered in each chapter.

Chapters are structured around cultural texts and multimedia materials with interactive exercises, activities, and tasks designed to enable students to practice their language skills in a variety of contexts and modes of communication (interpretive, interpersonal, and presentational) in order to gradually increase the complexity and length of discourse students can understand and produce. These activities include a collaborative project at the end of each chapter.

While the chapters in Diverse Russian can be done out of order, we recommend doing the chapter on Ukraine first, in part because the vocabulary in that chapter will help students to prepare to learn about all of the different places in the different chapters.

To learn more about the following aspects of the book, click on the corresponding plus signs.

Chapters

The book has 6 chapters, with the following themes:

Chapter Structure

Each chapter has a similar structure.

Part 1: Introduction to the place (may include basic facts, geography, ethnic and religious makeup, interesting facts, history, information about language and language policy, information about major cities)

Part 2: Review of vocabulary related to the lexical topic, New vocabulary related to the lexical topic, Grammar related to the lexical topic, along with practice of this vocabulary and grammar

Part 3: Reading, listening, and speaking related to the place and lexical topic, including an activity that gives students an opportunity to share with each other and others outside of their university

Part 4: Reference, which includes pages that have the vocabulary gathered onto one page, a page with all speaking activities, a page with all texts.

Diverse Russian has a system of color-coding the activities that are included in it to help students orient themselves quickly as they are working through it.

Many activities include drop-down glossaries labeled with Лексика. In most cases, these are vocabulary items that will help students understand a text or video, but are not intended to be part of the active vocabulary of the unit. Usually they occur in the order that they appear in the text or video. If students want more information about them, or to look them up later, they can consult the Лексика reference page for each chapter. That page includes searchable lists of the vocabulary that appears in the chapter, as well as spreadsheet and Google doc versions of that full vocabulary list.

Stress marks did not display correctly in the platform, but we have included them on the main Google doc vocabulary lists in each unit.

Navigating lessons

You can open the Table of Contents to the book by clicking “Contents” on the top left. You will see the names of the chapters. You can click the plus signs to open the chapter and see the names of the pages in the chapters. You can jump around among the pages using these links in the Table of Contents. Or you can navigate the lesson by clicking on the red “Previous” or “Next” buttons that are at the very bottom of the page.

Technical Information

We have found that the Chrome browser works the best with these materials, and the Safari browser has problems on occasion.

While the lessons may work on mobile devices, they were made with a larger screen in mind, and we recommend that you use the book on a larger screen.

Suggestions for how to use the materials in class

We have attempted to make this material as flexible as possible so that it could be used in a wide variety of contexts, and of course how you use it with your students will depend a lot on your own context. You can have your students do the work mostly independently, or you can do it together with them in class. You are also welcome to pick and choose from the activities based on how they fit into your course structure. You can complete each chapter as a unit, or you can work individual activities into your course schedule.

Here is one suggestion for how you might use a chapter:

Part 1 (Introduction to the place) – Have students complete 2-3 pages in advance of each class day and then dedicate 2-4 class days to the content, depending on the level of your students

Part 2 (Introduction to the lexical topic) – Have students complete 1-2 pages in advance of each class day and then dedicate 1-2 class days to the content, depending on the level of your students

Part 3 (Work with reading and listening) – Have students complete 1-2 pages in advance of each class day and then dedicate 2-4 class days to the content, depending on the level of your students

Student Accountability

The nature of the Pressbooks platform that houses Diverse Russian is that there is not a direct way to hold students accountable if you would like them to do some of their work outside of class. However, we have several suggestions for how you can do this.

1. Diverse Russian is available on the Pressbooks Directory, and is fully open as an Open Educational Resource (OER), so if you have your own Pressbooks account, you can download the book and offer it to your students that way. Some institutions have the ability to connect Pressbooks to their course management systems. Diverse Russian carries a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike license (see below for more information).
2. Diverse Russian includes a lot of interactive activities through H5P. We have enabled the ability for others to download these activities and upload them into a course management system if so desired.
3. We have provided printable versions of many of the activities if you would prefer that your students complete them on paper.
4. Many activities include a “summary” page that gives your students the ability to submit a screenshot to you if you so prefer.

Supplementary Materials

We have also created supplementary materials that we plan to continue to develop expand. These include:

A Teachers Manual – Detailed suggestions for how to use individual pages in each lesson

Quizlet sets – Available for students to use to practice vocabulary from the chapters

Google Docs – Printable versions of some of the activities as well as slides that could be used in class

Copyright

The book has a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike license, which means that anyone can use it as long as they attribute the source, use it for noncommercial purposes, and any derivative works have a similarly open license.

We have attempted to use Creative Commons media wherever possible, and have carefully cited our sources. If there are any incorrect citations or other problems with multimedia materials, please contact us at diverserussian@gmail.com and we would be happy to make corrections.

Report problems

If you have any problems in using this book, we would appreciate it if you would let us know using this form.

Familiarization webinar

A familiarization webinar was held on August 22, 2024. View the webinar here.