request for participation

[Benjamin Rifkin]

Dear Colleagues:

I am currently working on a project on error gravity in Russian, and invite
you and others you know to participate in this project.  The project is
designed to assess the degree to which one or another error in learner
speech in Russian is irritating to different groups of listeners:

1) native speakers of Russian, regardless of their profession, regardless of
their place of residence
2) instructors of Russian, regardless of their nationality, regardless of
their place of residence

The speech samples have been loaded up on to a web site in a program
designed to facilitate their analysis.  There are 10 speech samples each of
which is approximately 1 minute in length.  It will take approximately 30
minutes to complete the survey and send the results to me by e-mail.

The program can be downloaded quickly from the web if you are on any college
or university network onto any PowerMacintosh or PC using Windows '95 or
Windows 3.1.  If downloaded over a modem, the download process can take an
hour or so, depending on the speed of the modem.

In the case of an institution with a number of instructors of Russian or a
number of native speakers of Russian on the staff or faculty (regardless of
whether or not they teach Russian), it may be efficient to ask the language
lab to download the program once and then arrange for individuals to have
access to the program in the lab rather than to download it many times.

The URL for the error gravity project is:

http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/slavic/rifkin/errorgravity/index.html

The program is available both in English and in Russian.

If you have any questions about the program or the research project, please
do not hesitate to contact me.

Thank you for your time.

With best regards,

Ben Rifkin

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Benjamin Rifkin

Associate Professor of Slavic Languages
Coordinator of Russian-Language Instruction

Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1432 Van Hise Hall, 1220 Linden Dr.
Madison, WI  53706  USA

voice:  608/262-1623
fax:  608/265-2814
e-mail:  brifkin at facstaff.wisc.edu

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