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SLAV 9 AND 10
INTERMEDIATE RUSSIAN

Day-by-day calendar:  Fall  Spring

Prerequisites. Slav 5-6 (Intensive First-Year Russian), Slav 4 (Fourth semester Russian from the Basic Sequence), or equivalent. Students coming into the Russian sequence from outside GWU can place into the course by placement exam.

Meetings and credit. The class meets five hours per week for five credits per semester.

Team-teachers. Slav 9-10 is team taught. Your teachers are

Galina Shatalina. E-mail - shagal@gwu.edu. Phone: 994-0889. Office hours - Monday 2:30-4:00, Wednesday 1:00-3:30, Friday 9:30-11:30.
Ludmila Guslistova. E-mail – ludmila@gwu.edu. Office hours - Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday: 1:45 - 3:30.

Professor Guslistova will devote the bulk of the time to traditional classroom activities, such as a systematic review and expansion of of grammar, practice in reading texts and dialogs for pronunciation, and practice in day-to-day communication in role-play situations. This traditional "grammar" section also includes a great deal of work on listening comprehension using recordings from Russian television.

Professor Shatalina will concentrate on more communicative activities: your ability to talk at length about your personal interests, as well as readings and discussions of topical articles from the press and short stories. You will find that you will be recycling much of the grammar that you learn in the "grammar" section in subsequent "conversation" sections.

Professor Richard Robin (rrobin@gwu.edu) is responsible for technical support for the course. If you have difficulties downloading parts of the on-line textbook or accessing any other assigned online materials, contact him directly by e-mail.

On e-mailing your teachers or Professor Robin: All e-mails should be written in Russian. If you do not know how to Russianize your e-mail, see www.gwu.edu/~slavic/gw-cyrillic/cyrilize.htm. If the procedures there do not help, contact Professor Robin (rrobin@gwu.edu).

Assumed starting point. Upon enrollment students should be able to do the following:

Speaking. Handle simple social conventions, carry on conversations about themselves, their daily lives, and survival situations such as ordering a meal, getting theater tickets, making purchases, and giving short instructions.

Listening. Understand most everyday face-to-face conversations and get the gist of simple radio and TV broadcasts and short presentations on very familiar topics.

Reading. Get the main ideas and some details from short articles in Russian-language newspapers and adapted short stories.

Writing. Write a short letter to a Russian friend, jot down a telephone message, take notes of what they heard on the radio/TV or in a short presentation on a familiar topic.

Grammar. Can produce the endings for all six cases for common nouns, adjectives, and pronouns. Can produce the conjugations of basic verbs, including the appropriate verbs of going. Familiar with the basic uses of each of the cases and the essentials of system of verbal aspect. Familiar with adjectival comparatives, verb imperatives and чтобы constructions.

Computer skills. You must be able to read and write e-mail in Cyrillic. See www.gwu.edu/~slavic/gw-cyrillic/cyrilize.htm.

Course goals. At the end of Slav 10, students can expect to speak Russian at the Intermediate Mid level on the ACTFL proficiency scale. Some will reach Intermediate High. In reading and listening, students can expect to reach Intermediate High or Advanced. The defining moment of Intermediate High is the ability to work with paragraphs in reading or speaking about familiar factual material. For this reason, you will be working towards building paragraphs in speaking and writing and reading and listening to paragraphed prose. In many cases you will see discussion topics from your previous study of Russian. For example, you will spend much time talking about your family, a well-worn topic from basic Russian. However, in an elementary Russian course you had to answer simple questions about your family. In this course, you'll be learning to hold the floor for several minutes at a time on these topics.

Grades. The final grade for the semester is given on the basis of activities undertaken in both sections of the class. These include:

· Attendance (See below).
· Classroom activities: texts and dialogs, discussions, etc.
· Major graded assignments such as oral reports and compositions
· Announced quizzes on areas such as declension, conjugation, and vocabulary (but no pop quizzes)
· Major tests
· Final Exam
· Final Oral Proficiency Interview

Attendance. Attendance is mandatory. Absences not cleared with the instructor in advance will be counted as major test-grade zeroes. If you must be absent because of illness or any other reason, call your instructors before class at 202-994-7081 and leave a message on the machine. (Your message will be automatically time-stamped.) Include your name, the reason for your absence, and a number where you can be reached. Failure to call in advance leads to a test-grade of zero entered into your grade sheet, which is sure to devastate your final mark. For example, an A student with one such unexcused absence is likely to get a B-. The same A student with two such absences risks a D for the final grade. In short, we place the highest emphasis on consistent attendance.

One final reminder: an excused absence does not excuse you from missing homework. Make sure you call either the instructor or another student to find out and complete the assignment. You must make up any missed tests and quizzes immediately upon return to class.

Homework. Homework takes the form of assignments in listening, reading, compositions, preparation of texts to be read in class, and oral reports. You should plan to spend up to two hours of preparation for every hour of class time.

Tests retakes. In certain cases you may be permitted to retake major tests on which you have done poorly, particularly if you score lower than a B-. However, the rules concerning retakes are fairly rigid. The are summarized here. Click for a full description.

· You may retake only major tests (not quizzes or daily assignments or the final exam)
· You may have only one retake. (This differs from the policy for Basic Intensive Russian.)
· You must retake within one week of the day on which the test was returned in class.
· You may not retake the same day of a major test.
· You must score at least a B- for the retake to count.
· After a successful retake your score is B- or the average of the in-class test or the retake, whichever is higher.

Composition rewrites. Grades on compositions carry the same weight as those for major tests, but the rewrite policy differs. For each assigned composition you are expected to write a rough draft, which is graded, and a final version, on which you receive a second grade. The two grades are then averaged. The final version of the composition must be turned in before the rough draft for a new composition is turned in. Otherwise the rewrite grade becomes a zero.

Required text materials.

  1. Хавронина С. и Робин Р. Русский язык в обиходе. Registered GW students will find a downloadable version in PDF format through Prometheus. Look for “Downloadable Textbook” in the Syllabus section of any of these courses: Slav 9, Slav 10, Slav 11, Slav 12.
  2. Thompson, Irene. Reading Real Russian. (GW Bookstore)
  3. Tall, Emily and V. Vlasikova, Let’s talk about Life. GWU Bookstore.

Recommended materials.

  1. Beyer, Thomas. 501 Russian Verbs (Part of the Barron’s Series of foreign-language verb conjugation)
  2. Leed, Richard. 5000 Russian Words. Slavic Press.
  3. Ожегов О.И. и Шведова Н.Ю. «Толковый словарь русского языка». This is a Russian-to-Russian dictionary. Don’t kid yourself: you won’t be using it to look up definitions. But Ozhegov and Shvedova also have a wealth of information on declension and conjugation.
  4. Any good Russian-English / English-Russian dictionary, e.g.
  5. The Oxford Russian-English Dictionary and Oxford English-Russian Dictionary. (These are the best but also the most expensive.) In recent years, Oxford has produced a number of downsized bilingual dictionaries, nearly all of which are very good.
  6. HarperCollins English-Russian Russian-English Dictionary. Moderately priced and almost as good as Oxford.
  7. Katzner, Kenneth. Russian-English English-Russian Dictionary. John Wiley & Sons. Once the best dictionary on the market, it is no longer as good as the better Oxford and Harper’s dictionaries.
  8. Avoid small paperback dictionaries, especially Romanov’s pocket dictionary (the red, black, and white paperback). These dictionaries will do you more harm than good.

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German and Slavic Dept.

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