language maintenance over the summer?

[wverzhger at AOL.COM]

And the articles on BBC World News service in Russian are often of enough worldwide interest that there is a similar, although not exact article of the same story on the English page.  I've been able to build new vocabulary, as well as reinforce common words/phrases used in various specialized areas of interest (politics, military, education, etc.)  There is also lots of audio in Russian that can help with listening comprehension.

William Vernola


-----Original Message-----
From: Kjetil Rå Hauge <k.r.hauge at ILOS.UIO.NO>
To: SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU
Sent: Thu, 3 Apr 2008 6:40 am
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] language maintenance over the summer?


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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