Beginning Russian Through Film

[Slava Paperno]

This year the Russian Language Program at Cornell University is teaching an
experimental first-year Russian language course in which traditional
textbook materials are to a large extent replaced by excerpts from Russian
films, videos, television commercials, television programs, and
non-rehearsed videotaped scenes.

We use the World Wide Web for delivering the course materials to our
students. All transcripts of the dialogs in the clips, all glossaries,
exercises, as well as the course description and syllabus are on our Web
site, as are the soundtracks of the clips and audio recordings of the
exercises. The digital video files are on CD-ROMs that are used in
conjunction with our Web site.

This hybrid design allows us to update all texts quickly and easily and,
because the video files are on CD-ROMs, to offer high-quality, full-motion
video (which would not be possible if we put the video clips on the Web
along with the rest of the materials).

We would not be able to make these authentic materials accessible to
beginners if we didn't use digital technology. Very short clips are hard to
use on tape, because VCR controls are so imprecise. Linking transcripts to
video would be problematic. Glosses and comments would have to be printed on
paper and would not have direct links to the video. The tedium involved in
using such a cumbersome collection of aids would turn off most beginners.

Even on their first day in the lab, our students had no trouble using the
course on the Web, and had great fun watching, repeating, and translating
the dialog in their first assignment.

Please visit our Web site for more information about the course: read our
journal notes, peruse our list of sources, read the transcripts, look at the
glossaries, and see what kind of homework we assign on each day. We have
also provided some technical notes about the machinery we're using.

The project is called Beginning Russian Through Film. It is sponsored by The
Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning and by the Institute for
European Studies (Cornell University).

For more information, point your Macintosh or Windows browser to:

http://russian.dmll.cornell.edu/brtf/

Among other things, you'll find instructions for downloading and configuring
all software required for using our Web site, including Russian fotns with
accented vowels.
_______________

Slava Paperno
Director of The Russian Language Program
Department of Modern Languages
Morrill Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853-4701
tel. 607/277-3981, fax. 607/255-7491
sp27 at cornell.edu