IITU Commented on the Lessons in the Framework of a Joint Project with UNICEF
Professors of the Department of Languages of the International Information Technology University commented on the set of lessons of the course on improving literacy for foreign children. These lessons are hosted on the Swedish educational platform Akelius. They are designed for repatriate children aged 5 to 17 years.
The literacy project is being jointly developed by the Akelius Foundation, UNICEF and IITU. It has been implemented in Kazakhstan since September 2021 in 9 pilot schools. The total number of levels is five: A0, A1, A1.1, A2 (basic) and B1 (intermediate). Zhannura Manapbayeva, Head of the Department of Languages at IITU, explained what they were working on exactly.
“We find technical errors, and we also offer methodological and technical improvements to the Russian language course on the platform. The experts write down methodological recommendations for conducting each lesson on the platform. In general, in February and March 2022, we commented on A1.1 level, ” Zhannura Manapbayeva said.
Another participant of the project, Candidate of Philological Sciences, PhD, Assistant Professor of the Department of Languages Yevgeny Medvedev, told what types of errors are most common on the platform and expained some reasons for this.
“Technical errors are not very common. They appear, for example, due to the incompatibility of the Akelius application with some browsers. This is fixed by the technical specialist Nazar. We are more interested in semantic and stylistic errors. We associate their appearance with the fact that the course in English is taken as the basis for the curriculum of the Russian language, as well as for all other languages. However, Russian is much more difficult than English. Therefore, not everything that works in the English course is applicable to Russian,” Yevgeny Yuryevich said.
According to him, since in English the phrase looks almost the same in different versions, it is enough for students to learn the skeleton of a certain phrase and work it out in different contexts e.g. I send a message, You send a message, We send a message, They send a message. In Russian, however, everything is inclined by persons, cases and numbers, e.g. Я отправляЮ сообщение, Мы отправляЕМ, Вы отправляЕТЕ, Они отправляЮТ. Thus, it is necessary to give more practice to different forms, Yevgeny Medvedev emphasizes. He added though, that grammatical errors are rarely found on the platform.
His colleague Dinara Aliyeva, Assistant Professor, Candidate of Philological Sciences noted that errors related to cultural linguistics are also common. For example, in the sentences “Я вишу на потолке. Она висит на окне. Оно ест, Оно спит, Бабушка старая (а не пожилая), etc. there are no grammatical errors. However, in the context of Russian-speaking culture, such examples are inappropriate.
“Mistakes, or rather the inappropriateness of some examples, I define in terms of the frequency of use and activity of vocabulary. For example, I consider it necessary to replace such phrases as “ломтик пиццы”, “томат” in the meaning of “помидор”. More examples of such mistakes are “Они кладут стаканы позади чашек (ставят стаканы). Ты кладешь две чашки чая на стол (ставишь)” etc. When commenting on the lessons, I consider it important to give detailed instructions for the teachers who do not have experience in teaching Russian as a foreign language. In general, the platform is very interesting, lively, and modern for teaching languages,” Dinara Asylkhanovna said.
Yevgeny Medvedev agrees with this. He advises teachers, working with children on the Akelius platform, to correct the vocabulary of the lessons if necessary.
“Mistakes help us to gain knowledge of the Russian language and linguistic flair. We can draw the attention of developers to the fact that a native Russian speaker will not say so, as indicated in the application. We can also correct the vocabulary of the lessons and advise a more common word instead of the one suggested in the application,” Yevgeny Yuryevich said.
Among the technical shortcomings, the project participants name the need to always go through each section from the beginning, which concerns with the issues of navigation on the platform. It would be more convenient to go to any stage of the lesson at once. In addition, in their opinion, it would be good to end each lesson with small texts including the studied words and phrases (in accordance with the methodology of the Russian as a foreign language). Philologists also point out that the most important issue when compiling and commenting on the lessons is to assess whether the mastered material will allow the students to enter the real language practice among people who speak Russian.