Task-Based Instruction for Teaching Russian as a Foreign Language

Svetlana V. Nuss, Wendy Whitehead Martelle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000514872
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Idiomas

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.

Chapter 1 Task-based instruction for teaching Russian as a foreign language Perspectives and practice

Svetlana V. Nuss and Wendy Whitehead Martelle

DOI: 10.4324/9781003146346-1

Chapter summary

The chapter opens with a discussion of the cyclic nature of pedagogy and a brief overview of TBLT-related publications of the last decade. It then presents a comprehensive review of TBLT literature in the context of teaching L2 Russian beginning with Leaver and Kaplan (2004). The terms systemic mode (when an entire syllabus or institutional program is built and sequenced using task-based approach) and incremental mode (when teachers use tasks as an increment of instruction, more or less cohesively integrating them in an otherwise non-task-oriented course work, to include the use of tasks for assessment) are proposed to conceptualize and distinguish between the two ways tasks are used in teaching languages. Three instruments of task design are offered as potentially impactful for instructional design of task-based teaching of L2 Russian. The first instrument addresses Russian morphology and accounts for linguistic demands entailed in the task structure (based on Pallotti, 2019). The second instrument is the list of linguistic features that learners of L2 Russian should have command of, organized by proficiency levels (based on Long et al., 2012). The third instrument is the growing bank of pedagogical narrations of incremental and systemic models of task-based instruction of L2 Russian developed to date with a brief recap of the list. The chapter includes a comprehensive thematic analysis of the present volume’s contributions and their treatment of TBLT and its practice in L2 Russian classroom: (а) all tasks, whether used in systemic or incremental modes, involve a needs analysis before the task design; (b) the intention behind task design has a focus on meaning with a clear outcome other than the use of language; (c) the tasks involve authenticity in some form (either situational or interactional); (d) the tasks reflect a learner-centered approach that promotes learner agency and learner autonomy; (e) the tasks foster interaction. In addition, all contributions contain a cultural component, many authors emphasize proficiency development, feature technology-mediated tasks, address task sequencing, and reflect on the role of teacher and teacher agency in task-based instruction.

Краткое содержание главы

В главе рассматривается цикличность педагогики как общественного процесса, место целевого задания в обучении русскому как иностранному (РКИ) и достижения текущего десятилетия в развитии методики целевого задания. Подробно освещаются публикации, посвященные развитию метода целевого задания в обучении РКИ, начиная со статьи в соавторстве Leaver и Kaplan (2004). Вводятся термины системное (уровень программы или общего подхода в организации образовательного поля) и эпизодическое (использование целевого задания как отдельного эпизода в образовательном процессе, более или менее органично встроенного в курс, в том числе в целях выявления языковых компетенций обучающихся) употребление целевого задания в педагогической практике обучения иностранным языкам. Определены и описаны три инструмента для разработки целевых заданий в курсе РКИ. Первый инструмент выявлен у Pallotti (2019) и представляет собой систему определения лингвистической нагрузки целевого задания с учетом богатой морфологии русского языка. Второй потенциально действенный инструмент – Long et al. (2012), где статистически обоснованы и распределены по уровням компетенций языковые структуры русского языка, характеризующие уровень обучающегося. Третьим инструментом признана растущая база практических разработок и описаний вариантов воплощения целевого задания на практике; приводится подробный список рекомендуемых публикаций, освещающих и эпизодическое, и системное применение целевого задания в практике РКИ. Глава содержит синтез практических рекомендаций авторов сборника, использованные авторами определения целевого задания и интерпретации определений в практике РКИ. Так, (a) все без исключения авторы данного сборника выстраивают обучение, исходя из идентификации потребностей обучающихся в каждом конкретном случае как эпизодического, так и системного применения целевого задания; (b) целевое задание выходит за рамки языковой практики; смысловая нагрузка целевого задания имеет приложение в действительности; (c) целевое задание предполагает интерактивную или ситуативную аутентичность; (d) целевое задание личностно ориентировано, сосредоточено на обучающемся и его целях, предполагая наличие и способствуя формированию активного личностного начала обучающегося; (e) целевое задание порождает и развивает общение. Более того, все целевые задания имеют культурную составляющую; многие делают акцент на продвижении и развитии общей языковой компетенции; целевые задания задействуют современные компьютерные технологии; целевые задания структурированы и упорядочены в систему, выстраивая программу всего курса обучения; анализируется роль учителя/преподавателя в практике использования целевого задания при обучении РКИ.

Cyclic nature of pedagogy: task-based instruction and its use in teaching of Russian as a foreign language

In post–civil war Russia of 1930, its people devastated by famine and organized crime, in a country with ruined infrastructure and a nation entangled in societal tensions beyond any measure, a book was published. The book was titled Task-based instruction in a soviet preschool ~ Метод целевых заданий в советском детском саду: an earnest search for better ways to raise youth and a powerful testimony to the good of human spirit. Allow yourself to get past the politically charged language, and you will discover a rich source of task-based instruction that sounds surprisingly modern in its nature. Considering the number of orphans in Russia in the 1930s, the publication of this resource was a commendable event: dissemination of best practices in working with children who experienced severe adversity and trauma early in their young lives was the next best thing to not having such experiences enter the life of a child in the first place.

The book was published by the Институт повышения квалификации педагогов народного комиссариата просвещения [Institute of Continuous Teacher Education, Department of Education], in partnership with the Подотдел социального воспитания Московского отдела народного образования [Social Education Program of Moscow School District], and boasts an impressive 250 pages. In its opening chapter, the authors debate the nature of task-based learning with American colleagues and offer their own perspective on it. Many of the tasks described in the rest of its chapters, with small adjustments, would make meaningful units of instruction in a modern classroom: From starting a home library to finding out how pencils are made; from learning what firefighters do to arranging a dove’s nest (dove-keeping still exists as a hobby in Russia today); from discovering the wisdom of sustainable life in planning and planting a garden to raising a chicken – authentic, student-centered, and hands-on meaningful learning by any standards.

This long-forgotten volume of early childhood and youth pedagogy is living evidence of how cyclical the nature of society and pedagogy really is, and how often distance – time or miles – transforms new and old, thereby helping the next cycle to begin. It is difficult to tell with certainty when task-based instruction first came to be used in education; the field of foreign language teaching has employed it and formally researched and written about it since at least the 1980s (Breen, 1989; Crookes, 1986; Long, 1983, 1985; Prabhu, 1987; Richards et al., 1985).

Today TBLT is a widely practiced and researched approach to second language teaching (Plonsky & Kim, 2016). TBLT is adopted in various educational contexts (Schurz & Coumel, 2020) with a proven record of its effectiveness in facilitating language acquisition (Bryfonski & McKay, 2017). TBLT gained significant ground as an approach to practice in the last decade alone with new research advances summarized in Long (2015, 2016), Ellis (2017), Mackey (2020), inter alia; its own international association with a biannual conference (IATBLT – International Association of Task-Based Language Teaching), and a series of peer-reviewed publications. Some recent publications are setting-specific, such as TBLT in Asia (Thomas & Reinders, 2021); many volumes focus on the connection between TBLT and other theoretical concepts such as pragmatics, interactions, repetition, focus on form, and more (Ellis et al., 2020; Taguchi & Kim, 2018; Bygate, 2018; Willis & Willis, 2007; Nunan, 2004). In the most recent edited volumes related to TBLT, scholars have explored connections between tasks/TBLT and a variety of pedagogical concepts. For example, an early volume on technology-mediated TBLT (González-Lloret & Ortega, 2014) investigated the interface between tasks and the affordances of technology, with contributions focusing on L2 English, L2 Spanish, and L2 Chinese. In a more recent qualitative meta-analysis (Chong & Reinders, 2020) of 16 studies on technology-mediated TBLT, 14 highlighted English as an additional language, with the other two on L2 Chinese and L2 German. Bygate (2018) highlighted empirical studies on the effects of task repetition, all of which were in ESL or EFL contexts. In order to conceptualize TBLT as a research pedagogy, Samuda et al. (2018) brought together contributions by practitioner-researchers, the majority focusing on L2 English and some sample tasks in L2 French, L2 Spanish, L2 Chinese, L2 Japanese, and L2 Dutch. Volumes edited by Lambert and Oliver (2020) and Ellis et al. (2020) examine TBLT in a number of practice- and research-oriented chapters in various settings primarily in the context of L2 English (with some discussion of other languages) in theoretical and pedagogical perspectives, as well as weighing in on the issues of assessment of learning with tasks and of TBLT as an approach to instruction. In a volume on task-based approaches to teaching and assessing pragmatics (Taguchi & Kim, 2018), most of the contributions were carried out in an ESL/EFL context, with some studies focusing on L2 Spanish, L2 Dutch, L2 Italian, and Korean as an L2 and heritage language. To date, the great majority of volumes related to TBLT focus on the relationship between TBLT and pedagogical or theoretical concepts, while very few explore TBLT in language-specific settings other than ESL/EFL.

Contributor showcase

Continuing the well-established scholarship of teaching language through task, Task-based instruction for teaching Russian imparts a new cycle in RFL pedagogy with its collection of individual task-based instructional episodes and syllabus design exemplars. As such, it is the first representative collection of pedagogical narratives devoted entirely to task-based instruction of Russian as a foreign language. These pedagogical narratives come from a variety of voices and language-learning settings – the contributors range from novice practitioners to instructors with many years of experience. The settings encompass undergraduate university courses, a graduate-level teacher education class, language immersion or intensive programs, a community-based private school, and a study abroad short course. Some cases presented in this volume may impress the reader as extraordinary and cutting-edge, while others look more like daily instruction; every teacher needs both kinds in their professional repertoire. However, the fact that TBLT is successfully used in a RFL classroom is a feat in itself: the inner work and professional skill of someone who creates all or parts of course instruction for each cohort of their learners anew is no short of admirable. Teaching entirely without a textbook and even implementing tasks as increments requires time, creative energy, and a great deal of planning and foresight. It comes as no surprise that the most frequent instructor questions to experts are practice-related (Groothuijsen et al., 2020; Jefferson Education Exchange, 2019). Leaver and Kaplan (2004) report on the teaching conditions of the Defence Language Institute, where the instruction is often orchestrated в четыре руки – with two instructors teaching one cohort of students. Such environment is conducive to cooperative teaching and lends itself to common planning time and continuous collegiate reflection on instruction: a position of privilege not characteristic to the field of teaching RFL in the U.S. Having two instructors in an L2 Russian classroom is certainly far from norm in the realities of everyday foreign language teaching practice in the U.S. today.

One of the fundamental questions capable of informing instructional practices and shifting them to better meet the needs of learners of L2 Russian is the question of how acquisition of L2 morphology occurs and develops. Applied linguistics is still in search of the definite answer with two distinct approaches dominating the field: representational difficulties and processing difficulties (Montrul et al., 2008; Polinsky, 1997, 2008). The rich tapestry of Russian morphology has been a specific focus in a number of empirical SLA studies of the last two decades, marking this topic as particularly interesting to teachers of L2 Russian. To their benefit, this volume opens with an overview of recent research on the acquisition of L2 Russian as a morphologically rich language and the insight it provides for L2 Russian pedagogy (Nuss, Chapter 2).

The contributing authors have learned about TBLT from a variety of sources and share the definitions they have chosen as they developed tasks in their particular contexts. Within TBLT, defining the term task has been a point of discussion among scholars who have researched and used tasks in the language classroom. For example, Ellis (2003) compares various definitions of a task from a number of researchers (Breen, 1989; Bygate et al., 2001; Crookes, 1986; Lee, 2000; Long, 1985; Nunan, 1989; Prabhu, 1987; Richards et al., 1985; Skehan, 1996). Acknowledging its deeply nuanced nature, the discussion of what does and does not constitute a task, therefore, is largely kept out of this volume concentrating the focus of this volume on the aspects of specific relevance to L2 Russian. In addition to some of the definitions from the aforementioned scholars, this volume’s contributors have drawn on various descriptions of a task within the context of Russian as a Foreign Language: from Comer (2007, 2012a), deBenedette (2020), Markina (2018), and Gilabert and Castellví (2019). Although the contributors have chosen different definitions of task and task-based instruction, we notice a number of shared principles:

1. All tasks involve a needs analysis before the task design, that is, all instructors took into account their learners’ needs, interests, proficiency levels and abilities to inform the design of the task(s).
2. The intention behind the task design has a focus on meaning with a clear outcome other than the use of language. For Kositsky (Chapter 3), the learners needed to “break the code” of the Cyrillic alphabet; Kogan and Bondarenko’s contribution (Chapter 6) highlights the necessity of reading and interpreting real-world data like demographic charts or economic statistics. For Burvikova and Stremova’s participants (Chapter 9), asking for directions and researching/preparing for a train trip were the specific outcomes, while for Smirnova Henriques et al. (Chapter 7) the learners ordered food, bought souvenirs at a cultural fair, and learned how to write appropriate emails/texts in a variety of situations (such as a student explaining to an instructor why s/he would be late to class). Some of the outcomes relate specifically to the use of technology: in Esser’s contribution (Chapter 5), students created vlogs, Mendelevich (Chapter 11) highlights how students created an identity and interacted in virtual space, and Novikov and Vinokurova’s contribution (Chapter 4) showcase the use of an online corpus to aid in student essay writing. Additionally, some chapters focus on developing interview skills (Pastushenkov, Chapter 10; Zheltoukhova, Chapter 12), as well as debating skills (Zheltoukhova, Chapter 12; Nimis et al., Chapter 8), and participating in role-playing games (Pastushenk...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Task-based instruction for teaching Russian as a foreign language: perspectives and practice
• 2 Morphology acquisition research meets instruction of L2 Russian: a contextualized literature review
• 3 Cracking the Cyrillic code through tasks: implications for instruction and foreign language teacher education
• 4 Learner corpus as a medium for tasks
• 5 Task-based vlogs in an elementary Russian classroom
• 6 Russian and Russia through tasks for beginners: applying task-based language teaching at a low proficiency level
• 7 Teaching Russian in Brazil: learner-centered task design and TORFL connection
• 8 Task-based learning in the “grand simulation” context: six principles for success from isolated immersion programs
• 9 Использование целевого задания в краткосрочных курсах РКИ для иностранных студентов-нефилологов
• 10 Task-based peer interaction in Russian as a second/foreign language classes
• 11 Kommunalka: virtual space as a platform for task-based learning
• 12 Developing global competence in an advanced Russian course
• 13 TBLT in Russian classrooms: reflections on practice and future directions
• References
• Index