The place and pedagogy of reading in the Russian language curriculum

This dissertation documents the place of reading in the current landscape of Russian language teaching materials and instructional methods. Many factors make acquiring reading ability in Russian challenging for English speakers: word order variation and syntax, the Cyrillic alphabet (potential grapheme misreading), extensive vocabulary built on unfamiliar Slavic roots (i.e., few cognates), structural distinctions between conversational and literary languages, and post-perestroika overhauls that have greatly changed Russian society, its texts and contexts since 1991.; Chapter 1 briefly presents an overview of reading theory and other related literature about reading proficiency assessment and strategy instruction along with a summary of research on Russian language learning in the United States. Chapter 2, a textbook inventory, summarizes each book's structure and reading materials, assessing the materials in relationship to reading acquisition theory. Analysis reveals that reading passages are short, and most exercises pose short answer, verbatim, factual comprehension questions, requiring word- and sentence-level interaction with the text. Textbooks and ancillary materials include authentic and semi-authentic texts, but materials are often poorly integrated into chapter themes and course materials. Texts and exercises often do not require that students think critically about passage content or make cultural comparisons.; Chapter 3 presents Results from a nation-wide survey of college-level Russian language instructors and shows that the most frequently used activities are specific, bottom-up, or text-based (students determine meaning of unknown words from context, discuss grammatical questions, or determine word meanings from roots and prefixes). Much less frequently instructors have students perform more global tasks (retelling the text and discussing main ideas).; Chapter Four continues the introductory chapter's analysis of reading materials by looking at current approaches to reading such as Kern's literacy-oriented organizing principle and Swaffar, Arens and Byrnes' meaning-based model of reading where students read globally and interpret a text's message(s) by recognizing social and cultural contexts. The chapter concludes with an application of these theories to a reading project using an excerpt from Anatolii Nikolaevich Kurchatkin's novella "House of Women" for intermediate-level (third semester) Russian language students.