The Art of Teaching Russian: Research, Pedagogy, and Practice ed. by Evgeny Dengub, Irina Dubinina and Jason Merrill (review)

While building upon previous research, experience, and best practices of pedagogical methodologies and clearly demonstrating a continuum of approaches to teaching foreign languages, The Art of Teaching Russian: Research, Pedagogy, and Practice takes an important step forward in highlighting new developments. It positions teaching Russian language and culture within the larger field of teaching Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTL) and foreign languages in general, specifically addressing the revised 21^st century ACTFL proficiency guidelines and the World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages that now include Russian, thus creating a new framework for guiding instruction.

Not limited to Russian, it begins by addressing the state of the profession with chapters broadly analyzing the teaching of foreign languages that would interest any instructor. Following a broad introduction, including informative articles on faculty positions in Russian in American colleges and universities and Russian programs (unfortunately, not that many are left with the recent cuts in Humanities and in foreign language instruction in particular), the articles narrow down to the specifics of teaching Russian and address the new standards and innovative approaches. The volume's logical progression leads to topics that are more specific: curriculum and materials development; reconceptualization of grammar instruction; and the shift from Communicative Language Teaching, for years the gold standard, to transformative language learning and teaching. The curriculum and materials development section serves as a welcome invitation to encourage instructors to develop new Russian textbooks. It addresses the representation and diversity that clearly has been missing in Russian textbooks, since most are invariably limited to the white native speaker of Russian who lives in one of the big cities of Central Russia, to the exclusion of multiple other groups. The final two parts of the book focus on teaching culture and teaching and learning Russian with technology.

Most of the articles explore general language-acquisition issues and interest a broad range of language specialists. They discuss language pedagogy and include familiar themes: teaching with songs (Chapter 11), developing textbooks (Chapter 12), using extracurricular activities (Chapter 17), film (Chapter 9), developing intercultural competence (Chapter 15), oral history projects (Chapter 10), and addressing diversity (Chapter 13), among others. Some concrete examples that have to do directly with Russian language include using proverbs (with great examples), songs, films, and history. To an extent, some of these pedagogies seem almost too familiar to any instructor of a foreign language, who most likely has used all of the above-mentioned approaches in their classes. It begs the question why this book would be introduced by its editors as a new step in the development of research and best practices in teaching Russian and why a language instructor would find it worthy of their time.

The answer to this question seems to be straightforward enough. In addition to familiar topics, the book raises many new issues: inadequate language proficiency of teaching assistants (TAs) (Chapter 4); use of Language Corpora (LC), a new field in Russian, with detailed examples and recommendations (Chapter 14); research on Russian programs in the US (Chapter 3), and data on faculty positions in Russian (Chapter 2), among many others. Even with the old and familiar topics of grammar, culture, etc., the authors incorporate new data and original research that, together with examples from the Russian language, would make the book an interesting and useful read for any Russian instructor.

Teaching Russian has not been as well-documented and researched as teaching more frequently taught languages in the US, such as Spanish, French or German. A new book as well as new textbooks have been long overdue. The Art of Teaching Russian: Research, Pedagogy, and Practice will clearly be filling the existing gap and hopefully creating a bridge to more data and research in the field as well as a development of more innovative teaching materials, including textbooks for different levels of proficiency and online programs with new technologically mediated teaching methods. The...