language maintenance over the summer?

[Kjetil Rå Hauge]

Susan Bauckus wrote:
> I don’t wish to discourage people from reading literary texts, but the ones
> available to students at that level are often dreary. When I had to read
> those, I started to suspect that Russian literature was not all it was
> cracked up to be. A nice set of texts for students on many levels are the
> news items on the BBC Russian service at www.bbcrussian.com. People who
> prefer something more stately than the newspaper format of the home page
> can choose the "bez grafiki" option, which presents the texts in a single
> row without columns or pictures. 
> 
> While dense, the texts are blessedly short – a headline and 1-2 sentences –
> and complete. The topics are often familiar to American students, and
> frequently include a fair number of familiar toponyms, names of well-known
> figures, cognates, and frequently occurring vocabulary that are all likely
> to help people along. I've never found any reading material that my
> beginning students like as much as these, and they get a sense of
> accomplishment from finishing them. Students can look up words by pasting
> them into www.rambler.ru/dict, which will identify verbs in any form and
> nouns in any case. 

Instead of looking up words one by one, you can access BBC Russian news 
(and other pages) through a Gymnazilla server: 
<http://dev.eurac.edu:8080/cgi-bin/gymnazilla/start.pl>
... and get a page with pop-up translations into English.

-- 
---
Kjetil Rå Hauge, U. of Oslo, PO Box 1003 Blindern, N-0315 Oslo, Norway
Tel. +47/22856710, fax +47/22854140

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