Readings in Russian. Students will expand their knowledge and further develop skills in the areas of listening, speaking, reading, writing, and culture. In the fourth semester, there is a special emphasis on reading. Texts chosen will include stories, descriptions of Russian traditions and customs, and some readings about contemporary events. C. Detailed Description of Conduct of Course Class instruction focusses on communication practice utilizing the situations, conversation tasks, vocabulary, culture, and grammar introduced in a given chapter.
Class is conducted almost exclusively in the target language.
In speaking, students will be able to handle successfully a limited number of interactive, task- oriented and social situations. Students will develop listening skills that will enable them to understand learned utterances, some longer sentence-length utterances, and will begin to understand main ideas and some facts from interactive exchanges and connected aural texts. As regards writing, students will be able to meet a number of practical writing needs by communicating simple facts and ideas in a loose collection of sentences. There is growing evidence of control of the syntax of noncomplex sentences and basic inflectional morphology, such as declensions and conjugations. Students will become aware of an increasing number of social customs and will have mastered a number of these in group role playing.